Not sure I completely understand the question...

If it's about the buffer that's created during `write` within `NettyTcpConnection`, it does it through the internal `Allocator`, so technically yes, Allocator already pools buffers and reuses them later (pretty much what we recently discussed).  

But since here we don't have access to either channel or the allocator, I'm afraid there's no other way other than to create a new one.

Although if there's a mapping within channel from `ByteBuf` to `Buffer`, using this codec looks not like the best idea, since it's all just waste of cycles and objects for conversion round trips...

Did I understand you correctly?