Motiviation:
Checking reference count on every access on a ByteBuf can have some big performance overhead depending on how the access pattern is. If the user is sure that there are no reference count errors on his side it should be possible to disable the check and so gain the max performance.
Modification:
- Add io.netty.buffer.bytebuf.checkAccessible system property which allows to disable the checks. Enabled by default.
- Add microbenchmark
Result:
Increased performance for operations on the ByteBuf.
Motivation:
The latest netty-tcnative fixes a bug in determining the version of the runtime openssl lib. It also publishes an artificact with the classifier linux-<arch>-fedora for fedora-based systems.
Modifications:
Modified the build files to use the "-fedora" classifier when appropriate for tcnative. Care is taken, however, to not change the classifier for the native epoll transport.
Result:
Netty is updated the the new shiny netty-tcnative.
Motivation:
Allows for running benchmarks from built jars which is useful in development environments that only take released artifacts.
Modifications:
Move benchmarks into 'main' from 'test'
Add @State annotations to benchmarks that are missing them
Fix timing issue grabbing context during channel initialization
Result:
Users can run benchmarks more easily.
Motivation:
The Http2FrameWriterBenchmark JMH harness class name was not updated for the JVM arguments. The number of forks is 0 which means the JHM will share a JVM with the benchmarks. Sharing the JVM may lead to less reliable benchmarking results and as doesn't allow for the command line arguments to be applied for each benchmark.
Modifications:
- Update the JMH version from 0.9 to 1.7.1. Benchmarks wouldn't run on old version.
- Increase the number of forks from 0 to 1.
- Remove allocation of environment from static and cleanup AfterClass to using the Setup and Teardown methods. The forked JVM would not shut down correctly otherwise (and wait for 30+ seconds before timeing out).
Result:
Benchmarks that run as intended.
Motivation:
A microbenchmark will be useful to get a baseline for performance.
Modifications:
- Introduce a new microbenchmark which tests the Http2DefaultFrameWriter.
- Allow benchmarks to run without thread context switching between JMH and Netty.
Result:
Microbenchmark exists to test performance.
Motivation:
When Netty runs in a managed environment such as web application server,
Netty needs to provide an explicit way to remove the thread-local
variables it created to prevent class loader leaks.
FastThreadLocal uses different execution paths for storing a
thread-local variable depending on the type of the current thread.
It increases the complexity of thread-local removal.
Modifications:
- Moved FastThreadLocal and FastThreadLocalThread out of the internal
package so that a user can use it.
- FastThreadLocal now keeps track of all thread local variables it has
initialized, and calling FastThreadLocal.removeAll() will remove all
thread-local variables of the caller thread.
- Added FastThreadLocal.size() for diagnostics and tests
- Introduce InternalThreadLocalMap which is a mixture of hard-wired
thread local variable fields and extensible indexed variables
- FastThreadLocal now uses InternalThreadLocalMap to implement a
thread-local variable.
- Added ThreadDeathWatcher.unwatch() so that PooledByteBufAllocator
tells it to stop watching when its thread-local cache has been freed
by FastThreadLocal.removeAll().
- Added FastThreadLocalTest to ensure that removeAll() works
- Added microbenchmark for FastThreadLocal and JDK ThreadLocal
- Upgraded to JMH 0.9
Result:
- A user can remove all thread-local variables Netty created, as long as
he or she did not exit from the current thread. (Note that there's no
way to remove a thread-local variable from outside of the thread.)
- FastThreadLocal exposes more useful operations such as isSet() because
we always implement a thread local variable via InternalThreadLocalMap
instead of falling back to JDK ThreadLocal.
- FastThreadLocalBenchmark shows that this change improves the
performance of FastThreadLocal even more.
Motivation:
Our Unsafe*ByteBuf implementation always invert bytes when the native ByteOrder is LITTLE_ENDIAN (this is true on intel), even when the user calls order(ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN). This is not optimal for performance reasons as the user should be able to set the ByteOrder to LITTLE_ENDIAN and so write bytes without the extra inverting.
Modification:
- Introduce a new special SwappedByteBuf (called UnsafeDirectSwappedByteBuf) that is used by all the Unsafe*ByteBuf implementation and allows to write without inverting the bytes.
- Add benchmark
- Upgrade jmh to 0.8
Result:
The user is be able to get the max performance even on servers that have ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN as their native ByteOrder.
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.
- Add common optimization options when launching a new JVM to run a benchmark
- Fix a bug where a benchmark report is uploaded twice
- Simplify pom.xml and move the build instruction messages to DefaultBenchmark
- Print an empty line to prettify the output
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.
