Motivation:
Add an option (through a SelectStrategy return code) to have the Netty event loop thread to do busy-wait on the epoll.
The reason for this change is to avoid the context switch cost that comes when the event loop thread is blocked on the epoll_wait() call.
On average, the context switch has a penalty of ~13usec.
This benefits both:
The latency when reading from a socket
Scheduling tasks to be executed on the event loop thread.
The tradeoff, when enabling this feature, is that the event loop thread will be using 100% cpu, even when inactive.
Modification:
Added SelectStrategy option to return BUSY_WAIT
Epoll loop will do a epoll_wait() with no timeout
Use pause instruction to hint to processor that we're in a busy loop
Result:
When enabled, minimizes impact of context switch in the critical path
3a96e7373b