Serializing floating point numbers leads to weird precision offset errors:
<?php
echo round(96.670000000000002, 2);
// 96.67
echo serialize(round(96.670000000000002, 2));
// d:96.670000000000002;
echo serialize(96.67);
// d:96.670000000000002;
?>
Not only is this wrong, but it adds a lot of unnecessary bulk to serialized data. Probably better to use json_encode() instead (which apparently is faster than serialize(), anyway).