- Proposed fix for #1824
UniqueName and its subtypes do not allow getting the previously registered instance. For example, let's assume that a user is running his/her application in an OSGi container with Netty bundles and his server bundle. Whenever the server bundle is reloaded, the server will try to create a new AttributeKey instance with the same name. However, Netty bundles were not reloaded at all, so AttributeKey will complain that the name is taken already (by the previously loaded bundle.)
To fix this problem:
- Replaced UniqueName with Constant, AbstractConstant, and ConstantPool. Better name and better design.
- Sctp/Udt/RxtxChannelOption is not a ChannelOption anymore. They are just constant providers and ChannelOption is final now. It's because caching anything that's from outside of netty-transport will lead to ClassCastException on reload, because ChannelOption's constant pool will keep all option objects for reuse.
- Signal implements Constant because we can't ensure its uniqueness anymore by relying on the exception raised by UniqueName's constructor.
Introduce a new interface called MessageSizeEstimator. This can be specific per Channel (via ChannelConfig). The MessageSizeEstimator will be used to estimate for a message that should be written. The default implementation handles ByteBuf, ByteBufHolder and FileRegion. A user is free to plug-in his/her own implementation for different behaviour.
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.
