Benches on Bytes & Strings To Nums

I've been experimenting with different ways to encode/decode data and along the way ran the following benchmarks. I had the need to store all data types to a database as either a string or byte slice.

Benchmark_strToInt      20000000                72.0 ns/op
Benchmark_bytesToInt    50000000                24.4 ns/op
Benchmark_strToFloat    20000000               118 ns/op
Benchmark_bytesToFloat  50000000                23.9 ns/op
Benchmark_b64ToBytes     5000000               354 ns/op
Benchmark_gobNewDecoder  1000000              1583 ns/op  

A few observations:

• You can store binary data, []byte, with json, but json encodes/decodes to/from base64
• Converting []byte to int/float is very fast
• Using gob requires creating a new encoder/decoder for every use

Benchmark Code

Does the speed of encoding the data matter when you have database, network nd db driver overhead?

If the encoding or decoding is executed as part of every transaction, then I figured every little bit helps. I am currently working with boltdb which reads data really fast, so the decode/unmarshal process could certainly be a factor in the total time to process a request. In my situation a lot of data conversions are going on.

Profiles or gtfo

I haven't used that acronym before, but will remember it in case the right situation comes along. Curious why you use a name that implies Haskell suxs.