Hi,
It is indeed great news from the Undertow team. The arguments on picking
Netty seems quite valid and
makes perfect sense for a company as Red Hat to work closely to the
community, focusing on new solutions
that may put the company back as a reference in the JVM world.
One question though that raised in my team lies on our continuous benchmark
on Undertow since its 1.0.x version.
As major features has been introduced, the performance has dropped by
12-15% depending on the hardware. It is
also noticeable the performance difference between XNIO and Netty, where
the Netty handles around 7.3-9% less
requests/sec than XNIO.
It may sound negligible at first glance, but some of my customers received
custom implementations that relied on
its remarkable performance to squeeze their software in a commodity
hardware. In the mid-term, it means they will
have an increase on their infrastructure cost.
That being said, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask how RedHat and
JBoss.org plans to cope with this sort of issue
in the future, and which impact on this regard should we really expect.
Kind Regards,
Miere
On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 10:28 AM Stuart Douglas <sdouglas(a)redhat.com> wrote:
The Java network programming world has come a long way since Undertow
was
first started. Netty has emerged as the de-facto standard for network
programming in Java, and the Undertow team has decided that the benefits of
utilising Netty outweigh any benefits in keeping our XNIO based transport
layer.
Undertow 3.0 will keep Undertow’s programming model, however the
underlying transport will be changed from XNIO to Netty. We will also use
the Netty HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and Websocket implementations. We believe this
change will have a number of advantages:
-
It will allow other Netty based services (e.g GRPC) to share the same
HTTP port
-
It allows sharing of threads between Undertow and other Netty based
services, resulting in services using less resources
-
The underlying transport implementation are the most complex part of
Undertow, delegating this to Netty will significantly reduce the work
needed to maintain Undertow
As part of this Flavia Rainone will be taking over as project lead from
Stuart Douglas so he can focus on the recently announced Quarkus project,
however Stuart will continue to be heavily involved in Undertow for the
foreseeable future.
Flavia Rainone has been involved in JBoss community since 2002 and has an
extensive background on Remoting and Xnio. In the past years, she acted as
EJB component lead for WildFly, besides contributing to several projects
in WildFly, such as IronJacamar, JBoss MSC and XNIO, and also Byteman. All
this makes her a good fit for taking over Undertow leadership.
What does this mean for me?
What this means for you will depend on which parts of Undertow you are
using:
-
If you are using the Servlet API then you will likely not notice any
change. You will need some different dependencies (Netty instead of XNIO),
however the rest of the experience should be mostly identical
-
If you are using the low level Undertow HttpHandler and
HttpServerExchange and you want to use Undertow 3.0 then you will need to
migrate your application. For the most part this migration should be
straightforward, as most concepts from the old API directly map to the new
API.
Road Map
2.x
The existing Undertow 2.x branch will continue to be maintained for the
foreseeable future. It will receive bug and security fixes, and some
features, however it is unlikely to receive any more low level transport
oriented features (e.g. HTTP/3 support). For now it is a perfectly valid
choice to stay on Undertow 2 while the new Netty based implementation
matures.
3.x
A 3.0 final version should be released in the next few months, however in
the short term the 3.x branch will not provide the same level of API
compatibility that Undertow has traditionally provided. As the Netty
implementation is new this will allow us to potentially fix any issues we
find with our approach without being locked in to supporting an API that is
not ideal.
This is a great time to try out the new API and report and problems or
suggestions. Note that this is explicitly referring to the core
HttpServerExchange based API, no major plans are expected to the Servlet
API (i.e. ServletExtension and DeploymentInfo).
4.x
After a short 3.x cycle we are planning on releasing a 4.x that will
provide API stability, in the same way that Undertow 1.x and 2.x have.
How can I contribute
You can contribute to Undertow in the same way it has always been done.
We have an email list open for discussion here:
undertow-dev(a)lists.jboss.org
Jira issues can be accessed here:
https://issues.jboss.org/projects/UNDERTOW/issues
And source code for 3.x is here:
https://github.com/undertow-io/undertow/tree/3.0.x
Also, with the move from HipChat to Zulip in Wildfly team, you can now
access Undertow stream via Zulip at
https://wildfly.zulipchat.com/
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