Motivation:
ByteToMessageDecoder requires using an intermediate List to put results into. This intermediate list adds overhead (memory/CPU) which grows as the number of objects increases. This overhead can be avoided by directly propagating events through the ChannelPipeline via ctx.fireChannelRead(...). This also makes the semantics more clear and allows us to keep track if we need to call ctx.read() in all cases.
Modifications:
- Remove List from the method signature of ByteToMessageDecoder.decode(...) and decodeLast(...)
- Adjust all sub-classes
- Adjust unit tests
- Fix javadocs.
Result:
Adjust ByteToMessageDecoder as noted in https://github.com/netty/netty/issues/8525.
Motivation:
ByteBuf supports “marker indexes”. The intended use case for these is if a speculative operation (e.g. decode) is in process the user can “mark” and interface and refer to it later if the operation isn’t successful (e.g. not enough data). However this is rarely used in practice,
requires extra memory to maintain, and introduces complexity in the state management for derived/pooled buffer initialization, resizing, and other operations which may modify reader/writer indexes.
Modifications:
Remove support for marking and adjust testcases / code.
Result:
Fixes https://github.com/netty/netty/issues/8535.
Motivation:
The examples have not been updated since long time ago, showing various
issues fixed in this commit.
Modifications:
- Overall simplification to reduce LoC
- Use system properties to get options instead of parsing args.
- Minimize option validation
- Just use System.out/err instead of Logger
- Do not pass config as parameters - just access it directly
- Move the main logic to main(String[]) instead of creating a new
instance meaninglessly
- Update netty-build-21 to make checkstyle not complain
- Remove 'throws Exception' clause if possible
- Line wrap at 120 (previously at 80)
- Add an option to enable SSL for most examples
- Use ChannelFuture.sync() instead of await()
- Use System.out for the actual result. Use System.err otherwise.
- Delete examples that are not very useful:
- applet
- websocket/html5
- websocketx/sslserver
- localecho/multithreaded
- Add run-example.sh which simplifies launching an example from command
line
- Rewrite FileServer example
Result:
Shorter and simpler examples. A user can focus more on what it actually
does than miscellaneous stuff. A user can launch an example very
easily.
I must admit MesageList was pain in the ass. Instead of forcing a
handler always loop over the list of messages, this commit splits
messageReceived(ctx, list) into two event handlers:
- messageReceived(ctx, msg)
- mmessageReceivedLast(ctx)
When Netty reads one or more messages, messageReceived(ctx, msg) event
is triggered for each message. Once the current read operation is
finished, messageReceivedLast() is triggered to tell the handler that
the last messageReceived() was the last message in the current batch.
Similarly, for outbound, write(ctx, list) has been split into two:
- write(ctx, msg)
- flush(ctx, promise)
Instead of writing a list of message with a promise, a user is now
supposed to call write(msg) multiple times and then call flush() to
actually flush the buffered messages.
Please note that write() doesn't have a promise with it. You must call
flush() to get notified on completion. (or you can use writeAndFlush())
Other changes:
- Because MessageList is completely hidden, codec framework uses
List<Object> instead of MessageList as an output parameter.
The API changes made so far turned out to increase the memory footprint
and consumption while our intention was actually decreasing them.
Memory consumption issue:
When there are many connections which does not exchange data frequently,
the old Netty 4 API spent a lot more memory than 3 because it always
allocates per-handler buffer for each connection unless otherwise
explicitly stated by a user. In a usual real world load, a client
doesn't always send requests without pausing, so the idea of having a
buffer whose life cycle if bound to the life cycle of a connection
didn't work as expected.
Memory footprint issue:
The old Netty 4 API decreased overall memory footprint by a great deal
in many cases. It was mainly because the old Netty 4 API did not
allocate a new buffer and event object for each read. Instead, it
created a new buffer for each handler in a pipeline. This works pretty
well as long as the number of handlers in a pipeline is only a few.
However, for a highly modular application with many handlers which
handles connections which lasts for relatively short period, it actually
makes the memory footprint issue much worse.
Changes:
All in all, this is about retaining all the good changes we made in 4 so
far such as better thread model and going back to the way how we dealt
with message events in 3.
To fix the memory consumption/footprint issue mentioned above, we made a
hard decision to break the backward compatibility again with the
following changes:
- Remove MessageBuf
- Merge Buf into ByteBuf
- Merge ChannelInboundByte/MessageHandler and ChannelStateHandler into ChannelInboundHandler
- Similar changes were made to the adapter classes
- Merge ChannelOutboundByte/MessageHandler and ChannelOperationHandler into ChannelOutboundHandler
- Similar changes were made to the adapter classes
- Introduce MessageList which is similar to `MessageEvent` in Netty 3
- Replace inboundBufferUpdated(ctx) with messageReceived(ctx, MessageList)
- Replace flush(ctx, promise) with write(ctx, MessageList, promise)
- Remove ByteToByteEncoder/Decoder/Codec
- Replaced by MessageToByteEncoder<ByteBuf>, ByteToMessageDecoder<ByteBuf>, and ByteMessageCodec<ByteBuf>
- Merge EmbeddedByteChannel and EmbeddedMessageChannel into EmbeddedChannel
- Add SimpleChannelInboundHandler which is sometimes more useful than
ChannelInboundHandlerAdapter
- Bring back Channel.isWritable() from Netty 3
- Add ChannelInboundHandler.channelWritabilityChanges() event
- Add RecvByteBufAllocator configuration property
- Similar to ReceiveBufferSizePredictor in Netty 3
- Some existing configuration properties such as
DatagramChannelConfig.receivePacketSize is gone now.
- Remove suspend/resumeIntermediaryDeallocation() in ByteBuf
This change would have been impossible without @normanmaurer's help. He
fixed, ported, and improved many parts of the changes.
- Fixes#1229
- Primarily written by @normanmaurer and revised by @trustin
This commit removes the notion of unfolding from the codec framework
completely. Unfolding was introduced in Netty 3.x to work around the
shortcoming of the codec framework where encode() and decode() did not
allow generating multiple messages.
Such a shortcoming can be fixed by changing the signature of encode()
and decode() instead of introducing an obscure workaround like
unfolding. Therefore, we changed the signature of them in 4.0.
The change is simple, but backward-incompatible. encode() and decode()
do not return anything. Instead, the codec framework will pass a
MessageBuf<Object> so encode() and decode() can add the generated
messages into the MessageBuf.
- ChannelBuffer gives a perception that it's a buffer of a
channel, but channel's buffer is now a byte buffer or a message
buffer. Therefore letting it be as is is going to be confusing.
- In computing, 'stream' means both byte stream and message stream,
which is confusing.
- Also, we were already mixing stream and byte in some places and
it's better use the terms consistently.
(e.g. inboundByteBuffer & inbound stream)
- Extracted some handler methods from ChannelInboundHandler into
ChannelStateHandler
- Extracted some handler methods from ChannelOutboundHandler into
ChannelOperationHandler
- Moved exceptionCaught and userEventTriggered are now in
ChannelHandler
- Channel(Inbound|Outbound)HandlerContext is merged into
ChannelHandlerContext
- ChannelHandlerContext adds direct access methods for inboud and
outbound buffers
- The use of ChannelBufferHolder is minimal now.
- Before: inbound().byteBuffer()
- After: inboundByteBuffer()
- Simpler and better performance
- Bypass buffer types were removed because it just does not work at all
with the thread model.
- All handlers that uses a bypass buffer are broken. Will fix soon.
- CombinedHandlerAdapter does not make sense anymore either because
there are four handler interfaces to consider and often the two
handlers will implement the same handler interface such as
ChannelStateHandler. Thinking of better ways to provide this feature
- Replaced FrameDecoder and OneToOne(Encoder|Decoder) with:
- (Stream|Message)To(String|Message)(Encoder|Decoder)
- Moved the classes in 'codec.frame' up to 'codec'
- Fixed some bugs found while running unit tests
Split the project into the following modules:
* common
* buffer
* codec
* codec-http
* transport
* transport-*
* handler
* example
* testsuite (integration tests that involve 2+ modules)
* all (does nothing yet, but will make it generate netty.jar)
This commit also fixes the compilation errors with transport-sctp on
non-Linux systems. It will at least compile without complaints.
