On 24 Apr 2012, at 12:25, Manik Surtani wrote:


On 24 Apr 2012, at 09:25, Mircea Markus wrote:


The reason I ask is that at some point we should look at not only an NIO impl (I know you had one that you experimented with some while back) but also a JDK7 NIO2 one, and benchmark the three.

Agreed. I'd expect an NIO/NIO2 client to handle much better the async requests from client to the server than the current IO client which is optimised for sync operations. 

I was just wondering because the entire stack could be async, all the way from API call to network transport, and the network future appropriately wrapped and returned as a return value to the client.  If a sync API is called, just delegate to the async operation and call get() once on the compound future.  Should make for a very clean and high performance client.
With NIO  the async path should be faster indeed, but would affect the sync path as there would be a point in which client threads are blocked waiting for the transport thread (inter thread com). Instead of waiting they could do the work interaction themselves and avoid the passing of requests/responses for one thread to the other.
Performance wise, I don't think NIO would overtake IO for for *sync* calls  but it will for *async* calls. Also code wise, I don't think it would be simpler, just because of NIO's model and inter thread communication. But I think a NIO client would be of interest especially when using the clients in async mode. And performance wise for sync clients - we might see different numbers than what I expect.