netty/netty — pull request #2387 by tea-dragon (2014-04-14 21:35:55+00:00)
Title: Fix error that causes (up to) double memory usage

Motivation:

PoolArena's 'normalizeCapacity' function was micro-optimized some
time ago to remove a while loop. However, there was a change of
behavior in the function as a result. Capacities passed into it
that are already powers of 2 (and >= 512) are doubled in size. So
if I ask for a buffer with a capacity of 1024, I will get back one
that actually uses 2048 bytes (stored in maxLength).

Aligning to powers of two for book keeping ease is reasonable,
and if someone tries to expand a buffer, you might as well use some
of the previously wasted space. However, since this distinction
between 'easily expanded' and 'costly to expand' space is not
supported at all by the APIs, I cannot imagine this change to
doubling is desirable or intentional.

This is especially costly when using composite buffers. They
frequently allocate components with a capacity that is a power of
2, and they never attempt to expand components themselves. The end
result is that heavy use of pool-backed composite buffers wastes
almost half of the memory pool (the smaller / initial components are
<512 and so are not affected by the off-by-one bug).

Modifications:

Although I find it difficult to believe that such an optimization
is really helpful, I left it in and fixed the off-by-one issue by
decrementing the value at the start.

I also added a simple test to both attempt to verify that the
decrement fixes the issue without introducing any other change, and
to make it easy for a reviewer to test the existing behavior. PoolArena
does not seem to have much testing or testability support though so
the test is kind of a hack and will break for unrelated changes. I
suggest either removing it or factoring out the single non-static
portion of normalizeCapacity so that the fragile dummy PoolArena is
not required.

Result:

Pooled allocators will allocate less resources to the highly
inefficient and undocumented buffer section between length and
maxLength.

Composite buffers of non-trivial size that are backed by pooled
allocators will use about half as much memory.