title: Protocol buffers handling very large String message?
body: <p>I was finally able to write protocol buffers code over REST and did some comparison with XStream which we are currently uses.
  Everything seems great, only stumble with one thing.</p>
  
  <p>We have very large messages in one particular attributes, say something like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>message Data {
     optional string datavalue=1;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Datavalue above are extremely huge text messages. Size is 512kb - 5 Mb.</p>
  
  <p>Protocol buffers deserialize just fine, with superb performance comparing to XStream.
  However, I notice when I send this message to wire (via REST), it took longer to get response. Always twice longer than XStream.
  I am thinking this might come from serializing time.</p>
  
  <p>From google documents, it says Protocol buffers is not designed to handle very large messages, although it can handle very large data set.</p>
  
  <p>I was wondering if anyone has some opinion or maybe solution from my case above?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>