Motivation:
Because of how we use reference counting we need to check for the reference count before each operation that touches the underlying memory. This is especially true as we use sun.misc.Cleaner.clean() to release the memory ASAP when possible. Because of this the user may cause a SEGFAULT if an operation is called that tries to access the backing memory after it was released.
Modification:
Correctly check the reference count on all methods that access the underlying memory or expose it via a ByteBuffer.
Result:
Safer usage of ByteBuf
Motivation:
Persuit for the consistency in method naming
Modifications:
- Remove the 'get' prefix from all HTTP/SPDY message classes
- Fix some inspector warnings
Result:
Consistency
Motivation:
To improve the speed of ByteBuf with order LITTLE_ENDIAN and where the native order is also LITTLE_ENDIAN (intel) we introduces a new special SwappedByteBuf before in commit 4ad3984c8b. Unfortunally the commit has a flaw which does not handle correctly the case when a ByteBuf expands. This was caused because the memoryAddress was cached and never changed again even if the underlying buffer expanded. This can lead to corrupt data or even to SEGFAULT the JVM if you are lucky enough.
Modification:
Always lookup the actual memoryAddress of the wrapped ByteBuf.
Result:
No more data-corruption for ByteBuf with order LITTLE_ENDIAN and no JVM crashes.
Motivation:
PoolArena's 'normalizeCapacity' function was micro-optimized some
time ago to remove a while loop. However, there was a change of
behavior in the function as a result. Capacities passed into it
that are already powers of 2 (and >= 512) are doubled in size. So
if I ask for a buffer with a capacity of 1024, I will get back one
that actually uses 2048 bytes (stored in maxLength).
Aligning to powers of two for book keeping ease is reasonable,
and if someone tries to expand a buffer, you might as well use some
of the previously wasted space. However, since this distinction
between 'easily expanded' and 'costly to expand' space is not
supported at all by the APIs, I cannot imagine this change to
doubling is desirable or intentional.
This is especially costly when using composite buffers. They
frequently allocate components with a capacity that is a power of
2, and they never attempt to expand components themselves. The end
result is that heavy use of pool-backed composite buffers wastes
almost half of the memory pool (the smaller / initial components are
<512 and so are not affected by the off-by-one bug).
Modifications:
Although I find it difficult to believe that such an optimization
is really helpful, I left it in and fixed the off-by-one issue by
decrementing the value at the start.
I also added a simple test to both attempt to verify that the
decrement fixes the issue without introducing any other change, and
to make it easy for a reviewer to test the existing behavior. PoolArena
does not seem to have much testing or testability support though so
the test is kind of a hack and will break for unrelated changes. I
suggest either removing it or factoring out the single non-static
portion of normalizeCapacity so that the fragile dummy PoolArena is
not required.
Result:
Pooled allocators will allocate less resources to the highly
inefficient and undocumented buffer section between length and
maxLength.
Composite buffers of non-trivial size that are backed by pooled
allocators will use about half as much memory.
Motivation:
When starting with a read-only NIO buffer, wrapping it in a ByteBuf,
and then later retrieving a re-wrapped NIO buffer the limit was getting
too short.
Modifications:
Changed ReadOnlyByteBufferBuf.nioBuffer(int,int) to compute the
limit in the same manner as the internalNioBuffer method.
Result:
Round-trip conversion from NIO to ByteBuf to NIO will work reliably.
This implementation does not produce as much GC pressure as CompositeByteBuf and so is prefered,
for writing an array of ByteBufs. Be aware that FixedCompositeByteBuf is readonly.
When using this in a project that make heavy use of CompositeByteBuf for writes we was able to cut
down allocation to a half.
Beside this it also helps to reduce CPU usage as nioBufferCount() is quite expensive when used on CompositeByteBuf which are
nested and contains a lot of components
that are not assigned to the same EventLoop. In general get* operations should always be safe to be used from different Threads.
This aslo include unit tests that show the issue
- Fixes#1528
It's not really easy to provide a general-purpose abstraction for fast-yet-safe iteration. Instead of making forEachByte() less optimal, let's make it do what it does really well, and allow a user to implement potentially unsafe-yet-fast loop using unsafe operations.
- Related: #1378
- They now accept only one argument.
- A user who wants to use a buffer for more complex use cases, he or she can always access the buffer directly via memoryAddress() and array()
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.
