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.
- Rename directbyDefault to preferDirect
- Add a system property 'io.netty.prederDirect' to allow a user from changing the preference on launch-time
- Merge UnpooledByteBufAllocator.DEFAULT_BY_* to DEFAULT
- Fixes#826
Unsafe.isFreed(), free(), suspend/resumeIntermediaryAllocations() are not that dangerous. internalNioBuffer() and internalNioBuffers() are dangerous but it seems like nobody is using it even inside Netty. Removing those two methods also removes the necessity to keep Unsafe interface at all.
- Add common optimization options when launching a new JVM to run a benchmark
- Fix a bug where a benchmark report is uploaded twice
- Simplify pom.xml and move the build instruction messages to DefaultBenchmark
- Print an empty line to prettify the output
This pull request introduces the new default ByteBufAllocator implementation based on jemalloc, with a some differences:
* Minimum possible buffer capacity is 16 (jemalloc: 2)
* Uses binary heap with random branching (jemalloc: red-black tree)
* No thread-local cache yet (jemalloc has thread-local cache)
* Default page size is 8 KiB (jemalloc: 4 KiB)
* Default chunk size is 16 MiB (jemalloc: 2 MiB)
* Cannot allocate a buffer bigger than the chunk size (jemalloc: possible) because we don't have control over memory layout in Java. A user can work around this issue by creating a composite buffer, but it's not always a feasible option. Although 16 MiB is a pretty big default, a user's handler might need to deal with the bounded buffers when the user wants to deal with a large message.
Also, to ensure the new allocator performs good enough, I wrote a microbenchmark for it and made it a dedicated Maven module. It uses Google's Caliper framework to run and publish the test result (example)
Miscellaneous changes:
* Made some ByteBuf implementations public so that those who implements a new allocator can make use of them.
* Added ByteBufAllocator.compositeBuffer() and its variants.
* ByteBufAllocator.ioBuffer() creates a buffer with 0 capacity.
