Implement an uber efficient network engine based on the Java NIO framework Netty. This is basically a complete rewrite of the Minecraft network engine with many distinct advantages. First and foremost, there will no longer be the horrid, and redundant case of 2, or even at times, 3 threads per a connection. Instead low level select/epoll based NIO is used. The number of threads used for network reading and writing will scale automatically to the number of cores for use on your server. In most cases this will be around 8 threads for a 4 core server, much better than the up to 1000 threads that could be in use at one time with the old engine. To facilitate asynchronous packet sending or receiving (currently only chat), a cached thread pool is kept handy. Currently this pool is unbounded, however at this stage we do not need to worry about servers being resource starved due to excessive spam or chat.
== Plugin incompatibilities
As a side effect of this change, plugins which rely on very specific implementation level details within Minecraft are broken. At this point in time, TagAPI and ProtocolLib are affected. If you are a user of ProtocolLib you are advised to update to the latest build, where full support is enabled. If you are a user of TagAPI, support has not yet been added, so you will need to install the updated ProtocolLib so that TagAPI may use its functions.
== Stability
The code within this commit has been very lightly tested in production (300 players for approximately 24 hours), however it is not guaranteed to be free from all bugs. If you experence weird connection behaviour, reporting the bug and steps to reproduce are advised. You are also free to downgrade to the latest recommend build, which is guaranteed to be stable.
== Summary
This commit provides a reduction in threads, which gives the CPU / operating system more time to allocate to the main server threads, as well as various other side benefits such as chat thread pooling and a slight reduction in latency.
This commit is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.