netty/netty — pull request #2704 by normanmaurer (2014-07-24 09:15:06+00:00)
Title: [#2693] Reduce memory usage of ChannelOutboundBuffer

Motiviation:

ChannelOuboundBuffer uses often too much memory. This is especially a problem if you want to serve a lot of connections. This is due the fact that it uses 2 arrays internally. One if used as a circular buffer and store the Entries that are never released (ChannelOutboundBuffer is pooled) and one is used to hold the ByteBuffers that are used for gathering writes.

Modifications:

Rewrite ChannelOutboundBuffer to remove these two arrays by:
- Make Entry recyclable and use it as linked Node
- Remove the circular buffer which was used for the Entries as we use a Linked-List like structure now
- Remove the array that did hold the ByteBuffers and replace it by an ByteBuffer array that is hold by a FastThreadLocal. We use a fixed capacity of 1024 here which is fine as we share these anyway.
- ChannelOuboundBuffer is not recyclable anymore as it is now a "light-weight" object. We recycle the internally used Entries instead.

Result:

Less memory footprint and resource usage. Performance seems to be a bit better but most likely as we not need to expand any arrays anymore.

Benchmark before change:
[nmaurer@xxx]~% wrk/wrk -H 'Host: localhost' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -d 120 -c 256 -t 16 --pipeline 256 http://xxx:8080/plaintext
Running 2m test @ http://xxx:8080/plaintext
16 threads and 256 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 26.88ms 67.47ms 1.26s 97.97%
Req/Sec 191.81k 28.22k 255.63k 83.86%
364806639 requests in 2.00m, 48.92GB read
Requests/sec: 3040101.23
Transfer/sec: 417.49MB

Benchmark after change:

[nmaurer@xxx]~% wrk/wrk -H 'Host: localhost' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -d 120 -c 256 -t 16 --pipeline 256 http://xxx:8080/plaintext
Running 2m test @ http://xxx:8080/plaintext
16 threads and 256 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 22.22ms 17.22ms 301.77ms 90.13%
Req/Sec 194.98k 41.98k 328.38k 70.50%
371816023 requests in 2.00m, 49.86GB read
Requests/sec: 3098461.44
Transfer/sec: 425.51MB