HBase: Thrift vs Rest performance
REST delivers as either XML or JSON so that the schema is present in the data itself. Thrift doesn't do this: it is just a load of bytes that then can only be deserialized against a generated entity (based on the thrift IDL definition).
So regardless of how the data is compressed, thrift is bound to be faster as it carries no schema with it, at the "cost" of being dependent on other objects to interpret the binary data.