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:
'length2 == 0' is not reachable because length1 and length2 are same at this point.
Motification:
Removed 'length2 == 0'.
Result:
Cleaner code.
Motivation:
The ByteString class currently assumes the underlying array will be a complete representation of data. This is limiting as it does not allow a subsection of another array to be used. The forces copy operations to take place to compensate for the lack of API support.
Modifications:
- add arrayOffset method to ByteString
- modify all ByteString and AsciiString methods that loop over or index into the underlying array to use this offset
- update all code that uses ByteString.array to ensure it accounts for the offset
- add unit tests to test the implementation respects the offset
Result:
ByteString and AsciiString can represent a sub region of a byte[].
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.
