Fast Serialization

We use ALOT of serialization in the current system I work with. Serializing/deserializing 100,000,000 objects in a day is pretty common. For a long time we knew that the binary formatter was fat and slow but never rationalized writing something custom as we were always fast enough. Unfortunately our data throughput has raised 400% in the last year (when you start with gigs and gigs of messages this is a huge gain) and our little three or four year old dual xeon 2.2 has turned into the little engine that could during peaks lately so we finally bit the big one and threw something together quickly.