I am considering switching some of my MQTT devices to the Homie format, because of the auto-discovery possibilities.
But I am wondering about its efficiency: somehow, sending 4 messages to publish 4 values seems less efficient than sending one JSON string. On the other hand, one does not need to parse the JSON.
Is this something to worry about? Or, perhaps a better question, at what message frequency is it something to worry about?
I will be at the most sending 4 values every second, and receiving them on the internal MQTT server, running on Raspberry Pi 3 (though I plan to upgrade to RPi 4).
This is how MQTT is supposed to work.
Don’t worry about the efficiency. You are talking about very small amounts of data here.