The AIO transport was added in the past as we hoped it would have better latency as the NIO transport. But in reality this was never the case.
So there is no reason to use the AIO transport at all. It just put more burden on us as we need to also support it and fix bugs.
Because of this we dedicided to remove it for now. It will stay in the master_with_aio_transport branch so we can pick it up later again if it is ever needed.
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#1282 (not perfectly, but to the extent it's possible with the current API)
- Add AddressedEnvelope and DefaultAddressedEnvelope
- Make DatagramPacket extend DefaultAddressedEnvelope<ByteBuf, InetSocketAddress>
- Rename ByteBufHolder.data() to content() so that a message can implement both AddressedEnvelope and ByteBufHolder (DatagramPacket does) without introducing two getter methods for the content
- Datagram channel implementations now understand ByteBuf and ByteBufHolder as a message with unspecified remote address.
shutdownGracefully() provides two optional parameters that give more
control over when an executor has to be shut down.
- Related issue: #1307
- Add shutdownGracefully(..) and isShuttingDown()
- Deprecate shutdown() / shutdownNow()
- Replace lastAccessTime with lastExecutionTime and update it after task
execution for accurate quiet period check
- runAllTasks() and runShutdownTasks() update it automatically.
- Add updateLastExecutionTime() so that subclasses can update it
- Add a constructor parameter that tells not to add an unncessary wakeup
task in execute() if addTask() wakes up the executor thread
automatically. Previously, execute() always called wakeup() after
addTask(), which often caused an extra dummy task in the task queue.
- Use shutdownGracefully() wherever possible / Deprecation javadoc
- Reduce the running time of SingleThreadEventLoopTest from 40s to 15s
using custom graceful shutdown parameters
- Other changes made along with this commit:
- takeTask() does not throw InterruptedException anymore.
- Returns null on interruption or wakeup
- Make sure runShutdownTasks() return true even if an exception was
raised while running the shutdown tasks
- Remove unnecessary isShutdown() checks
- Consistent use of SingleThreadEventExecutor.nanoTime()
Replace isWakeupOverridden with a constructor parameter
- 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().
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
- 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
