Motivation:
sun.misc.Unsafe allows us to handle heap ByteBuf in a more efficient matter. We should use special ByteBuf implementation when sun.misc.Unsafe can be used to increase performance.
Modifications:
- Add PooledUnsafeHeapByteBuf and UnpooledUnsafeHeapByteBuf that are used when sun.misc.Unsafe is ready to use.
- Add UnsafeHeapSwappedByteBuf
Result:
Better performance when using heap buffers and sun.misc.Unsafe is ready to use.
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
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
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.
- Fixes#826
Unsafe.isFreed(), free(), suspend/resumeIntermediaryAllocations() are not that dangerous. internalNioBuffer() and internalNioBuffers() are dangerous but it seems like nobody is using it even inside Netty. Removing those two methods also removes the necessity to keep Unsafe interface at all.
This pull request introduces the new default ByteBufAllocator implementation based on jemalloc, with a some differences:
* Minimum possible buffer capacity is 16 (jemalloc: 2)
* Uses binary heap with random branching (jemalloc: red-black tree)
* No thread-local cache yet (jemalloc has thread-local cache)
* Default page size is 8 KiB (jemalloc: 4 KiB)
* Default chunk size is 16 MiB (jemalloc: 2 MiB)
* Cannot allocate a buffer bigger than the chunk size (jemalloc: possible) because we don't have control over memory layout in Java. A user can work around this issue by creating a composite buffer, but it's not always a feasible option. Although 16 MiB is a pretty big default, a user's handler might need to deal with the bounded buffers when the user wants to deal with a large message.
Also, to ensure the new allocator performs good enough, I wrote a microbenchmark for it and made it a dedicated Maven module. It uses Google's Caliper framework to run and publish the test result (example)
Miscellaneous changes:
* Made some ByteBuf implementations public so that those who implements a new allocator can make use of them.
* Added ByteBufAllocator.compositeBuffer() and its variants.
* ByteBufAllocator.ioBuffer() creates a buffer with 0 capacity.
* UnsafeByteBuf is gone. I added ByteBuf.unsafe() back.
* To avoid extra instantiation, all ByteBuf implementations implement the ByteBuf.Unsafe interface.
* To hide this implementation detail, all ByteBuf implementations are package-private.
* AbstractByteBuf and SwappedByteBuf are public and they do not implement ByteBuf.Unsafe because they don't need to.
* unwrap() is not an unsafe operation anymore.
* ChannelBuf also has unsafe() and Unsafe. ByteBuf.Unsafe extends ChannelBuf.unsafe(). ChannelBuf.unsafe() provides free() operation so that a user does not need to down-cast the buffer in freeInbound/OutboundBuffer().
To perform writes in AioSocketChannel, we get a ByteBuffer view of the
outbound buffer and specify it as a parameter when we call
AsynchronousSocketChannel.write().
In most cases, the write() operation is finished immediately. However,
sometimes, it is scheduled for later execution. In such a case, there's
a chance for a user's handler to append more data to the outbound
buffer.
When more data is appended to the outbound buffer, the outbound buffer
can expand its capacity by itself. Changing the capacity of a buffer is
basically made of the following steps:
1. Allocate a larger new internal memory region.
2. Copy the current content of the buffer to the new memory region.
3. Rewire the buffer so that it refers to the new region.
4. Deallocate the old memory region.
Because the old memory region is deallocated at the step 4, the write
operation scheduled later will access the deallocated region, leading
all sort of data corruption or even segfaults.
To prevent this situation, I added suspendIntermediaryDeallocations()
and resumeIntermediaryDeallocations() to UnsafeByteBuf.
AioSocketChannel.doFlushByteBuf() now calls suspendIntermediaryDealloc()
to defer the deallocation of the old memory regions until the completion
handler is notified.
An AssertionError is triggered by a ByteBuf when beginRead() attempts to
access the buffer which has been freed already. This commit ensures the
buffer is not freed before performing an I/O operation.
To determine if the buffer has been freed, UnsafeByteBuf.isFreed() has
been added.
This commit introduces a new API for ByteBuf allocation which fixes
issue #643 along with refactoring of ByteBuf for simplicity and better
performance. (see #62)
A user can configure the ByteBufAllocator of a Channel via
ChannelOption.ALLOCATOR or ChannelConfig.get/setAllocator(). The
default allocator is currently UnpooledByteBufAllocator.HEAP_BY_DEFAULT.
To allocate a buffer, do not use Unpooled anymore. do the following:
ctx.alloc().buffer(...); // allocator chooses the buffer type.
ctx.alloc().heapBuffer(...);
ctx.alloc().directBuffer(...);
To deallocate a buffer, use the unsafe free() operation:
((UnsafeByteBuf) buf).free();
The following is the list of the relevant changes:
- Add ChannelInboundHandler.freeInboundBuffer() and
ChannelOutboundHandler.freeOutboundBuffer() to let a user free the
buffer he or she allocated. ChannelHandler adapter classes implement
is already, so most users won't need to call free() by themselves.
freeIn/OutboundBuffer() methods are invoked when a Channel is closed
and deregistered.
- All ByteBuf by contract must implement UnsafeByteBuf. To access an
unsafe operation: ((UnsafeByteBuf) buf).internalNioBuffer()
- Replace WrappedByteBuf and ByteBuf.Unsafe with UnsafeByteBuf to
simplify overall class hierarchy and to avoid unnecesary instantiation
of Unsafe instances on an unsafe operation.
- Remove buffer reference counting which is confusing
- Instantiate SwappedByteBuf lazily to avoid instantiation cost
- Rename ChannelFutureFactory to ChannelPropertyAccess and move common
methods between Channel and ChannelHandlerContext there. Also made it
package-private to hide it from a user.
- Remove unused unsafe operations such as newBuffer()
- Add DetectionUtil.canFreeDirectBuffer() so that an allocator decides
which buffer type to use safely
