Motivation:
ChannelMetadata has a field minMaxMessagesPerRead which can be confusing. There are also some cases where static instances are used and the default value for channel type is not being applied.
Modifications:
- use a default value which is set unconditionally to simplify
- make sure static instances of MaxMessagesRecvByteBufAllocator are not used if the intention is that the default maxMessagesPerRead should be derived from the channel type.
Result:
Less confusing interfaces in ChannelMetadata and ChannelConfig. Default maxMessagesPerRead is correctly applied.
Motiviation:
The current read loops don't fascilitate reading a maximum amount of bytes. This capability is useful to have more fine grain control over how much data is injested.
Modifications:
- Add a setMaxBytesPerRead(int) and getMaxBytesPerRead() to ChannelConfig
- Add a setMaxBytesPerIndividualRead(int) and getMaxBytesPerIndividualRead to ChannelConfig
- Add methods to RecvByteBufAllocator so that a pluggable scheme can be used to control the behavior of the read loop.
- Modify read loop for all transport types to respect the new RecvByteBufAllocator API
Result:
The ability to control how many bytes are read for each read operation/loop, and a more extensible read loop.
- No need to have fine-grained lookup table because the buffer pool has
much more coarse capacities available
- No need to use a loop to normalize a buffer capacity
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.
