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.
First cut at implementing a generic abstraction layer for pluggable
metrics providers. This first cut is closely modeled after Yammer
Metrics. It remains to be seen if it is indeed flexibel enough to
support other providers.
Provide a default implementation of this new abstraction layer
based on Yammer Metrics.
Support pluggable Monitoring Providers using Java 6's ServiceLoader.
Use this new abstraction layer to provide stats on (a) number of
Timeouts executed per second and (b) distribution of absolute
deviation between scheduled and actual Timeout execution time in
HashedWheelTimer.
* Interface ValueDistributionMonitor, a monitor for histograms.
* Interface EventRateMonitor, a monitor for measuring the rate per time
unit of specific events.
* Interface ValueMonitor, a monitor for tracking an arbitrary datum's
current value
* Interface CounterMonitor, a monitor for incrementing/decrementing a
long value
* Interface MonitorRegistry, a registry for monitors that serves as the
interface between Netty and concrete metrics providers as e.g. Yammer
Metrics.
* Interface MonitorRegistryFactory, to be implemented by metrics
providers.
* Document how to use Netty's new monitoring support in javadocs for
package io.netty.monitor.
