Motivation:
So far, we relied on the domain name resolution mechanism provided by
JDK. It served its purpose very well, but had the following
shortcomings:
- Domain name resolution is performed in a blocking manner.
This becomes a problem when a user has to connect to thousands of
different hosts. e.g. web crawlers
- It is impossible to employ an alternative cache/retry policy.
e.g. lower/upper bound in TTL, round-robin
- It is impossible to employ an alternative name resolution mechanism.
e.g. Zookeeper-based name resolver
Modification:
- Add the resolver API in the new module: netty-resolver
- Implement the DNS-based resolver: netty-resolver-dns
.. which uses netty-codec-dns
- Make ChannelFactory reusable because it's now used by
io.netty.bootstrap, io.netty.resolver.dns, and potentially by other
modules in the future
- Move ChannelFactory from io.netty.bootstrap to io.netty.channel
- Deprecate the old ChannelFactory
- Add ReflectiveChannelFactory
Result:
It is trivial to resolve a large number of domain names asynchronously.
- Fixes#2003 properly
- Instead of using 'bundle' packaging, use 'jar' packaging. This is
more robust because some strict build tools fail to retrieve the
artifacts from a Maven repository unless their packaging is not 'jar'.
- All artifacts now contain META-INF/io.netty.version.properties, which
provides the detailed information about the build and repository.
- Removed OSGi testsuite temporarily because it gives false errors
during split package test and examination.
- Add io.netty.util.Version for easy retrieval of version information
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.
