Motivation:
Circular assignment of arenas to thread caches can lead to less than optimal
mappings in cases where threads are (frequently) shutdown and started.
Example Scenario:
There are a total of 2 arenas. The first two threads performing an allocation
would lead to the following mapping:
Thread 0 -> Arena 0
Thread 1 -> Arena 1
Now, assume Thread 1 is shut down and another Thread 2 is started. The current
circular assignment algorithm would lead to the following mapping:
Thread 0 -> Arena 0
Thread 2 -> Arena 0
Ideally, we want Thread 2 to use Arena 1 though.
Presumably, this is not much of an issue for most Netty applications that do all
the allocations inside the eventloop, as eventloop threads are seldomly shut down
and restarted. However, applications that only use the netty-buffer package
or implement their own threading model outside the eventloop might suffer from
increased contention. For example, gRPC Java when using the blocking stub
performs some allocations outside the eventloop and within its own thread pool
that is dynamically sized depending on system load.
Modifications:
Implement a linear scan algorithm that assigns a new thread cache to the arena
that currently backs the fewest thread caches.
Result:
Closer to ideal mappings between thread caches and arenas. In order to always
get an ideal mapping, we would have to re-balance the mapping whenever a thread
dies. However, that's difficult because of deallocation.
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