best-practices

When to Use jq's --stream Option for Large JSON Processing

April 11, 2026 jqlang/jq ↗

Use jq --stream when processing JSON files too large to fit in memory, when extracting specific values from massive documents without loading the entire structure, or when handling line-delimited JSON streams incrementally.

The jq command-line JSON processor normally materializes the entire input document into an in-memory tree before applying filters. According to the jqlang/jq source code, the --stream flag switches the parser into incremental mode, yielding path-value pairs that enable O(depth) memory usage rather than O(size).

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