Motivation:
I introduced range checks as part of 6c47cc9711 in some places. Unfortunally I also added some where these are not needed and so caused a performance regression.
Modification:
Remove range checks where not needed
Result:
Fixed performance regression.
Note that this is build-time requirement. JDK 5 (for 3.x) or 6 (for 4.0+) is enough to run your Netty-based application.
Branches to look
The 'master' branch is where the development of the latest major version lives on. The development of all other versions takes place in each branch whose name is identical to <majorVersion>.<minorVersion>. For example, the development of 3.9 and 4.0 resides in the branch '3.9' and the branch '4.0' respectively.