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 could cause for example corrupt WebSocketFrame's if they was written from the server
to the client directly after it send the handshake response.
- Fixes#1308
freeInboundBuffer() and freeOutboundBuffer() were introduced in the early days of the new API when we did not have reference counting mechanism in the buffer. A user did not want Netty to free the handler buffers had to override these methods.
However, now that we have reference counting mechanism built into the buffer, a user who wants to retain the buffers beyond handler's life cycle can simply return the buffer whose reference count is greater than 1 in newInbound/OutboundBuffer().
- Added a test case that reproduces the problem in ReplayingDecoderTest
- Call newHandler.handlerAdded() *before* oldHandler.handlerRemoved() to ensure newHandlerAdded() is called before forwarding the buffer content of the old handler in replace0().
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
- Return early when the buffer is empty
- Keep only the number of byte buffers
- Remove unnecessary null check in the loop (because we know buffer is not empty at certain point)
- Fixes#1229
- Primarily written by @normanmaurer and revised by @trustin
This commit removes the notion of unfolding from the codec framework
completely. Unfolding was introduced in Netty 3.x to work around the
shortcoming of the codec framework where encode() and decode() did not
allow generating multiple messages.
Such a shortcoming can be fixed by changing the signature of encode()
and decode() instead of introducing an obscure workaround like
unfolding. Therefore, we changed the signature of them in 4.0.
The change is simple, but backward-incompatible. encode() and decode()
do not return anything. Instead, the codec framework will pass a
MessageBuf<Object> so encode() and decode() can add the generated
messages into the MessageBuf.
- Add ChannelHandlerUtil and move the core logic of ChannelInbound/OutboundMessageHandler to ChannelHandlerUtil
- Add ChannelHandlerUtil.SingleInbound/OutboundMessageHandler and make ChannelInbound/OutboundMessageHandlerAdapter implement them. This is a backward incompatible change because it forces all handler methods to be public (was protected previously)
- Fixes: #1119
* Correct reading offset of 1-byte-offset copies
* Keep track of how much we've written so far in order to validate offsets
* Uncomment and reduce number of tests
- Rename ChannelHandlerAdapter to ChannelDuplexHandler
- Add ChannelHandlerAdapter that implements only ChannelHandler
- Rename CombinedChannelHandler to CombinedChannelDuplexHandler and
improve runtime validation
- Remove ChannelInbound/OutboundHandlerAdapter which are not useful
- Make ChannelOutboundByteHandlerAdapter similar to
ChannelInboundByteHandlerAdapter
- Make the tail and head handler of DefaultChannelPipeline accept both
bytes and messages. ChannelHandlerContext.hasNext*() were removed
because they always return true now.
- Removed various unnecessary null checks.
- Correct method/field names:
inboundBufferSuspended -> channelReadSuspended
- Checksum header was being incorrectly read due to incorrect order of
shift and masking operations.
- Length field of 1-byte copy was being incorrectly interpreted due to a
typo in the binary mask used to extract it.
- Use ByteBuf.readUnsignedByte() instead of readByte() & 0xff
- Use bitwise-OR wherever possible
- Use EmbeddedByteChannel to test
- Use ByteBuf comparison instead of array comparison
- Work done by @lw346 and then revised by @trustin
- Move common methods from ByteBuf to Buf
- Rename ensureWritableBytes() to ensureWritable()
- Rename readable() to isReadable()
- Rename writable() to isWritable()
- Add isReadable(int) and isWritable(int)
- Add AbstractMessageBuf
- Rewrite DefaultMessageBuf and QueueBackedMessageBuf
- based on Josh Bloch's public domain ArrayDeque impl
This changes the behavior of the ChannelPipeline.remove(..) and ChannelPipeline.replace(..) methods in that way
that after invocation it is not possible anymore to access any data in the inbound or outbound buffer. This is
because it empty it now to prevent side-effects. If a user want to preserve the content and forward it to the
next handler in the pipeline it is adviced to use one of the new methods which where introduced.
- ChannelPipeline.removeAndForward(..)
- ChannelPipeline.replaceAndForward(..)
This pull request adds two new handler methods: discardInboundReadBytes(ctx) and discardOutboundReadBytes(ctx) to ChannelInboundByteHandler and ChannelOutboundByteHandler respectively. They are called between every inboundBufferUpdated() and flush() respectively. Their default implementation is to call discardSomeReadBytes() on their buffers and a user can override this behavior easily. For example, ReplayingDecoder.discardInboundReadBytes() looks like the following:
@Override
public void discardInboundReadBytes(ChannelHandlerContext ctx) throws Exception {
ByteBuf in = ctx.inboundByteBuffer();
final int oldReaderIndex = in.readerIndex();
super.discardInboundReadBytes(ctx);
final int newReaderIndex = in.readerIndex();
checkpoint -= oldReaderIndex - newReaderIndex;
}
If a handler, which has its own buffer index variable, extends ReplayingDecoder or ByteToMessageDecoder, the handler can also override discardInboundReadBytes() and adjust its index variable accordingly.
This pull request introduces a new operation called read() that replaces the existing inbound traffic control method. EventLoop now performs socket reads only when the read() operation has been issued. Once the requested read() operation is actually performed, EventLoop triggers an inboundBufferSuspended event that tells the handlers that the requested read() operation has been performed and the inbound traffic has been suspended again. A handler can decide to continue reading or not.
Unlike other outbound operations, read() does not use ChannelFuture at all to avoid GC cost. If there's a good reason to create a new future per read at the GC cost, I'll change this.
This pull request consequently removes the readable property in ChannelHandlerContext, which means how the traffic control works changed significantly.
This pull request also adds a new configuration property ChannelOption.AUTO_READ whose default value is true. If true, Netty will call ctx.read() for you. If you need a close control over when read() is called, you can set it to false.
Another interesting fact is that non-terminal handlers do not really need to call read() at all. Only the last inbound handler will have to call it, and that's just enough. Actually, you don't even need to call it at the last handler in most cases because of the ChannelOption.AUTO_READ mentioned above.
There's no serious backward compatibility issue. If the compiler complains your handler does not implement the read() method, add the following:
public void read(ChannelHandlerContext ctx) throws Exception {
ctx.read();
}
Note that this pull request certainly makes bounded inbound buffer support very easy, but itself does not add the bounded inbound buffer support.
- 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.
