Motivation:
We noticed that the headers implementation in Netty for HTTP/2 uses quite a lot of memory
and that also at least the performance of randomly accessing a header is quite poor. The main
concern however was memory usage, as profiling has shown that a DefaultHttp2Headers
not only use a lot of memory it also wastes a lot due to the underlying hashmaps having
to be resized potentially several times as new headers are being inserted.
This is tracked as issue #3600.
Modifications:
We redesigned the DefaultHeaders to simply take a Map object in its constructor and
reimplemented the class using only the Map primitives. That way the implementation
is very concise and hopefully easy to understand and it allows each concrete headers
implementation to provide its own map or to even use a different headers implementation
for processing requests and writing responses i.e. incoming headers need to provide
fast random access while outgoing headers need fast insertion and fast iteration. The
new implementation can support this with hardly any code changes. It also comes
with the advantage that if the Netty project decides to add a third party collections library
as a dependency, one can simply plug in one of those very fast and memory efficient map
implementations and get faster and smaller headers for free.
For now, we are using the JDK's TreeMap for HTTP and HTTP/2 default headers.
Result:
- Significantly fewer lines of code in the implementation. While the total commit is still
roughly 400 lines less, the actual implementation is a lot less. I just added some more
tests and microbenchmarks.
- Overall performance is up. The current implementation should be significantly faster
for insertion and retrieval. However, it is slower when it comes to iteration. There is simply
no way a TreeMap can have the same iteration performance as a linked list (as used in the
current headers implementation). That's totally fine though, because when looking at the
benchmark results @ejona86 pointed out that the performance of the headers is completely
dominated by insertion, that is insertion is so significantly faster in the new implementation
that it does make up for several times the iteration speed. You can't iterate what you haven't
inserted. I am demonstrating that in this spreadsheet [1]. (Actually, iteration performance is
only down for HTTP, it's significantly improved for HTTP/2).
- Memory is down. The implementation with TreeMap uses on avg ~30% less memory. It also does not
produce any garbage while being resized. In load tests for GRPC we have seen a memory reduction
of up to 1.2KB per RPC. I summarized the memory improvements in this spreadsheet [1]. The data
was generated by [2] using JOL.
- While it was my original intend to only improve the memory usage for HTTP/2, it should be similarly
improved for HTTP, SPDY and STOMP as they all share a common implementation.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ck3RQklyzEcCLlyJoqDXPCWRGVUuS-ArZf0etSXLVDQ/edit#gid=0
[2] https://gist.github.com/buchgr/4458a8bdb51dd58c82b4
Motivation:
The usage and code within AsciiString has exceeded the original design scope for this class. Its usage as a binary string is confusing and on the verge of violating interface assumptions in some spots.
Modifications:
- ByteString will be created as a base class to AsciiString. All of the generic byte handling processing will live in ByteString and all the special character encoding will live in AsciiString.
Results:
The AsciiString interface will be clarified. Users of AsciiString can now be clear of the limitations the class imposes while users of the ByteString class don't have to live with those limitations.
Motivation:
HTTP/2 codec was implemented in master branch.
Since, master is not yet stable and will be some time before it gets released, backporting it to 4.1, enables people to use the codec with a stable netty version.
Modification:
The code has been copied from master branch as is, with minor modifications to suit the `ChannelHandler` API in 4.x.
Apart from that change, there are two backward incompatible API changes included, namely,
- Added an abstract method:
`public abstract Map.Entry<CharSequence, CharSequence> forEachEntry(EntryVisitor<CharSequence> visitor)
throws Exception;`
to `HttpHeaders` and implemented the same in `DefaultHttpHeaders` as a delegate to the internal `TextHeader` instance.
- Added a method:
`FullHttpMessage copy(ByteBuf newContent);`
in `FullHttpMessage` with the implementations copied from relevant places in the master branch.
- Added missing abstract method related to setting/adding short values to `HttpHeaders`
Result:
HTTP/2 codec can be used with netty 4.1
Motivation:
Headers has getTimeMillis(), not getDate()
Modification:
- Replace HttpHeaders.getDate() with getTimeMillis() so that migration
is smoother
Result:
User code which accesses a date header is easier to migrate
Motivation:
The commit 50e06442c3 changed the type of
the constants in HttpHeaders.Names and HttpHeaders.Values, making 4.1
backward-incompatible with 4.0.
It also introduces newer utility classes such as HttpHeaderUtil, which
deprecates most static methods in HttpHeaders. To ease the migration
between 4.1 and 5.0, we should deprecate all static methods that are
non-existent in 5.0, and provide proper counterpart.
Modification:
- Revert the changes in HttpHeaders.Names and Values
- Deprecate all static methods in HttpHeaders in favor of:
- HttpHeaderUtil
- the member methods of HttpHeaders
- AsciiString
- Add integer and date access methods to HttpHeaders for easier future
migration to 5.0
- Add HttpHeaderNames and HttpHeaderValues which provide standard HTTP
constants in AsciiString
- Deprecate HttpHeaders.Names and Values
- Make HttpHeaderValues.WEBSOCKET lowercased because it's actually
lowercased in all WebSocket versions but the oldest one
- Add RtspHeaderNames and RtspHeaderValues which provide standard RTSP
constants in AsciiString
- Deprecate RtspHeaders.*
- Do not use AsciiString.equalsIgnoreCase(CharSeq, CharSeq) if one of
the parameters are AsciiString
- Avoid using AsciiString.toString() repetitively
- Change the parameter type of some methods from String to
CharSequence
Result:
Backward compatibility is recovered. New classes and methods will make
the migration to 5.0 easier, once (Http|Rtsp)Header(Names|Values) are
ported to master.
Motivation:
The header class hierarchy and algorithm was improved on the master branch for versions 5.x. These improvments should be backported to the 4.1 baseline.
Modifications:
- cherry-pick the following commits from the master branch: 2374e17, 36b4157, 222d258
Result:
Header improvements in master branch are available in 4.1 branch.
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:
We have quite a bit of code duplication between HTTP/1, HTTP/2, SPDY,
and STOMP codec, because they all have a notion of 'headers', which is a
multimap of string names and values.
Modifications:
- Add TextHeaders and its default implementation
- Add AsciiString to replace HttpHeaderEntity
- Borrowed some portion from Apache Harmony's java.lang.String.
- Reimplement HttpHeaders, SpdyHeaders, and StompHeaders using
TextHeaders
- Add AsciiHeadersEncoder to reuse the encoding a TextHeaders
- Used a dedicated encoder for HTTP headers for better performance
though
- Remove shortcut methods in SpdyHeaders
- Replace SpdyHeaders.getStatus() with HttpResponseStatus.parseLine()
Result:
- Removed quite a bit of code duplication in the header implementations.
- Slightly better performance thanks to improved header validation and
hash code calculation
Motivation:
We have different message aggregator implementations for different
protocols, but they are very similar with each other. They all stems
from HttpObjectAggregator. If we provide an abstract class that provide
generic message aggregation functionality, we will remove their code
duplication.
Modifications:
- Add MessageAggregator which provides generic message aggregation
- Reimplement all existing aggregators using MessageAggregator
- Add DecoderResultProvider interface and extend it wherever possible so
that MessageAggregator respects the state of the decoded message
Result:
Less code duplication
- 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.
* This is done because we noticed that the previous change limit the usage more then it gave us any benefit. Now it is possible
again to rewrite the url on the fly or reuse the objects when writing a proxy and so limit the GC pressure.
* Fixes also #979
- Rename message types for clarity
- HttpMessage -> FullHttpMessage
- HttpHeader -> HttpMessage
- HttpRequest -> FullHttpRequest
- HttpResponse -> FulllHttpResponse
- HttpRequestHeader -> HttpRequest
- HttpResponseHeader -> HttpResponse
- HttpContent now extends ByteBufHolder; no more content() method
- Make HttpHeaders abstract, make its header access methods public, and
add DefaultHttpHeaders
- Header accessor methods in HttpMessage and LastHttpContent are
replaced with HttpMessage.headers() and
LastHttpContent.trailingHeaders(). Both methods return HttpHeaders.
- Remove setters wherever possible and remove 'get' prefix
- Instead of calling setContent(), a user can either specify the content
when constructing a message or write content into the buffer.
(e.g. m.content().writeBytes(...))
- Overall cleanup & fixes
This commit tries to simplify the handling of Http easier and more consistent. This has a effect of many channges. Including:
- HttpMessage was renamed to HttpHeader and the setContent and getContent methods were removed
- HttpChunk was renamed to HttpContent
- HttpChunkTrailer was renamed to LastHttpContent
- HttpCodecUtil was merged into HttpHeaders
Now a "complete" Http message (request or response) contains of the following parts:
- HttpHeader (HttpRequestHeader or HttpResponseHeader)
- 0 - n HttpContent objects which contains parts of the content of the message
- 1 LastHttpContent which marks the end of the message and contains the remaining data of the content
I also changed the sematic of HttpResponse and HttpRequest, these now represent a "complete" message which contains the HttpHeader and the HttpLastContent, and so can be used to eeasily send requests. The HttpMessageAggregator was renamed to HttpObjectAggregator and produce HttpResponse / HttpRequest message.
Split the project into the following modules:
* common
* buffer
* codec
* codec-http
* transport
* transport-*
* handler
* example
* testsuite (integration tests that involve 2+ modules)
* all (does nothing yet, but will make it generate netty.jar)
This commit also fixes the compilation errors with transport-sctp on
non-Linux systems. It will at least compile without complaints.
