(forwarded from asio.user as serialization questions might be more appropriate here) Hi all, I plan to use serialization and asio together to exchange 'command objects' between two applications. Basically marshalling an object and sending it to a remote application. There is a simple asio example using serialization, but there are two issues I'd like to improve. [1] I am concerned about performance. The example constructs and destructs an archive for every single object and uses stringstream, which creates and copies a string object. Wouldn't using asio::tcp::iostreams give better performance? and [2]: I would like to utilize the boost.serialize class registration system to allow peer programmers to create new objects. In the example I would need to send a 'type' and the size manually in a 'header' before I serialize and send the actual object. That would require a system wide enumeration or other 'type' mechanism. My idea is to require all objects be derived from a common polymorphic base and then serialize a pointer to the object. The archive would serialize the entire object and also send type information with it, so the receiver could reconstruct the object simply by receiving a pointer. class basic_command; class my_command:public basic_command; On the senders side: my_command dosomething; archive << &dosomething; On the receiver side: basic_command *next_command; archive >> next_command; next_command->execute(); This would have the benefit that new commands could simply be created by deriving from basic_command. It might also have performance consequences and I have one specific question: For this in order to work I would need to disable tracking for 'my_command'. Otherwise only the very first instance of archive << &dosomething would actually send something. Question: Can I 'reset' the binary archive such that the tracking information is reset, but not the type information? Or can I temporarily disable tracking for a class or for the next save/load operation? I don't want to globally disable tracking for my_command, because I cannot rule out that someone might actually want tracking for their object in a different archive (such as saving settings to disk). I'd love to hear from you and any comments are welcome. Has anyone already done this? What are your experiences? Regards Hajo