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💻 Software🗄️ DatabasesVercel

Preview feature feedback: `jsonProtocol`

Freshover 2 years ago
Mar 14, 20260 views
Confidence Score80%
80%

Problem

Our new Json Protocol is in early preview since 4.11.0. During performance investigations and optimizations, we noticed that the existing protocol implementation using GraphQL added a CPU and memory overhead that was especially noticeable for larger Prisma schemas. Therefore, we found an alternative way to express our queries without needing that overhead: JSON. To try out the new protocol, enable the `jsonProtocol` Preview feature in your Prisma schema: [code block] Regenerate Prisma Client to use the new JSON protocol. For environments or situations where it is not viable to enable the Preview feature flag to your Prisma schema file, we also added an environment variable that you can use to force the use of the JSON Protocol Preview feature: `PRISMA_ENGINE_PROTOCOL=json`. ~~Note: This is an early Preview feature with a significant limitation: Invalid input to Prisma Client will throw unpolished, internal errors that are less descriptive and user-friendly than our usual ones. We intend to improve these future releases.~~ ~~Using it with Data Proxy and Prisma Data Platform currently also leads to errors.~~ We expect using `jsonProtocol` to improve Prisma Client's startup performance and memory usage significantly. This will likely have a more significant impact on applications with larger Prisma schemas. We would appreciate your feedback on this feature on the following particularly: 1. Does using this preview feature introduce any regressions or problems in your app

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
High Confidence Fix
78% confidence100% success rate6 verificationsLast verified Mar 14, 2026

Solution: Preview feature feedback: `jsonProtocol`

Low Risk

@janpio I haven't done a very thorough analysis and my app still needs a lot of tuning but at first glance I'm seeing some pretty decent improvements in performance in Vercel. I'm using a SQL Server DB with ~8,700 line schema file. Some observations on one function: Without "jsonProtocol" I was seeing ~790MB memory usage running upwards of 10 seconds on cold starts. With "jsonProtocol" I'm seein

78

Trust Score

6 verifications

100% success
  1. 1

    @janpio I haven't done a very thorough analysis and my app still needs a lot of

    I'm using a SQL Server DB with ~8,700 line schema file.

  2. 2

    Some observations on one function:

    Some observations on one function:

  3. 3

    Without "jsonProtocol" I was seeing ~790MB memory usage running upwards of 10 se

    With "jsonProtocol" I'm seeing ~330MB memory usage and upwards of 6 seconds on cold starts.

Validation

Resolved in prisma/prisma GitHub issue #18095. Community reactions: 13 upvotes.

Verification Summary

Worked: 6
Partial: 1
Last verified Mar 14, 2026

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Environment

Submitted by

AC

Alex Chen

2450 rep

Tags

prismaormpostgresqltopic:-performancetopic:-previewfeaturestopic:-jsonprotocol