Motivation:
We have websocket extension support (with compression) in old master. We should port this to 4.1
Modifications:
Backport relevant code.
Result:
websocket extension support (with compression) is now in 4.1.
Motivation:
The requirement for the masking of frames and for checks of correct
masking in the websocket specifiation have a large impact on performance.
While it is mandatory for browsers to use masking there are other
applications (like IPC protocols) that want to user websocket framing and proxy-traversing
characteristics without the overhead of masking. The websocket standard
also mentions that the requirement for mask verification on server side
might be dropped in future.
Modifications:
Added an optional parameter allowMaskMismatch for the websocket decoder
that allows a server to also accept unmasked frames (and clients to accept
masked frames).
Allowed to set this option through the websocket handshaker
constructors as well as the websocket client and server handlers.
The public API for existing components doesn't change, it will be
forwarded to functions which implicetly set masking as required in the
specification.
For websocket clients an additional parameter is added that allows to
disable the masking of frames that are sent by the client.
Result:
This update gives netty users the ability to create and use completely
unmasked websocket connections in addition to the normal masked channels
that the standard describes.
Motivation:
Websocket clients can request to speak a specific subprotocol. The list of
subprotocols the client understands are sent to the server. The server
should select one of the protocols an reply this with the websocket
handshake response. The added code verifies that the reponded subprotocol
is valid.
Modifications:
Added verification of the subprotocol received from the server against the
subprotocol(s) that the user requests. If the user requests a subprotocol
but the server responds none or a non-requested subprotocol this is an
error and the handshake fails through an exception. If the user requests
no subprotocol but the server responds one this is also marked as an
error.
Addiontionally a getter for the WebSocketClientHandshaker in the
WebSocketClientProtocolHandler is added to enable the user of a
WebSocketClientProtocolHandler to extract the used negotiated subprotocol.
Result:
The subprotocol field which is received from a websocket server is now
properly verified on client side and clients and websocket connection
attempts will now only succeed if both parties can negotiate on a
subprotocol.
If the client sends a list of multiple possible subprotocols it can
extract the negotiated subprotocol through the added handshaker getter (WebSocketClientProtocolHandler.handshaker().actualSubprotocol()).
I must admit MesageList was pain in the ass. Instead of forcing a
handler always loop over the list of messages, this commit splits
messageReceived(ctx, list) into two event handlers:
- messageReceived(ctx, msg)
- mmessageReceivedLast(ctx)
When Netty reads one or more messages, messageReceived(ctx, msg) event
is triggered for each message. Once the current read operation is
finished, messageReceivedLast() is triggered to tell the handler that
the last messageReceived() was the last message in the current batch.
Similarly, for outbound, write(ctx, list) has been split into two:
- write(ctx, msg)
- flush(ctx, promise)
Instead of writing a list of message with a promise, a user is now
supposed to call write(msg) multiple times and then call flush() to
actually flush the buffered messages.
Please note that write() doesn't have a promise with it. You must call
flush() to get notified on completion. (or you can use writeAndFlush())
Other changes:
- Because MessageList is completely hidden, codec framework uses
List<Object> instead of MessageList as an output parameter.
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.
This change also introduce a few other changes which was needed:
* ChannelHandler.beforeAdd(...) and ChannelHandler.beforeRemove(...) were removed
* ChannelHandler.afterAdd(...) -> handlerAdded(...)
* ChannelHandler.afterRemoved(...) -> handlerRemoved(...)
* SslHandler.handshake() -> SslHandler.hanshakeFuture() as the handshake is triggered automatically after
the Channel becomes active
