Does unity supported network frameworks use optimised packet builders?

Unity Engine
1

I have worked with all popular networking solutions, such as Unity built in, pun, photon server, smartfox, unet. Recently, for my own personal project i wrote my own server, i wrote quite optimized manual byte packet builder.

As i understand, most of these network frameworks use object serialization and remote calls, which creates overhead and packet byte size is larger. I did some tests with one networking solution comparing to mine, i sent couple variables in single packet, my packet was not more than 20 bytes, while this networking system was over 100.

Am i missing or don’t understand something? These solution are used by tens of thousands of developers, why they use approaches which create overhead on the packet size. Games which use these frameworks are non & real time applications, shouldn’t optimization be extremely important?

Hope someone can share their opinions on this!
Thank you for reading

2

For some of the same reasons why you went directly to writing your own bit packing library. The game industry has a long history of re-creating the wheel in this area, and most providers I think just assume that if you know enough to know you need bit packing, you will handle it yourself (most likely with a custom protocol).

Now I think this is wrong in a lot of ways, but that’s my take on it.