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.
- Removed VoidEnum because a user can now specify Void instead
- AIO: Prefer discardReadBytes to clear
- AIO: Fixed a potential bug where notifyFlushFutures() is not called
if flush() was requested with no outbound data
- 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.
- 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.
