ThreadRenamingRunnable

[Trustin Lee]

Hi Nick,

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Nicholas Clare <nickclare at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been reading through the Netty sources, to try to get a better
> idea of what's happening under the covers. One thing that has
> interested me is the use of ThreadRenamingRunnable. I'm currently
> planning a system that would use Netty for two different things at the
> same time. So there will be a Netty server socket for receiving client
> connections, and then another Netty server and client for
> intra-cluster communication. So my question is, would it be possible
> to disable Netty from renaming my threads, so that I can name them
> myself. Otherwise I imagine I'll have many "New I/O server worker
> #X-Y" threads, which would be harder to debug than "Cluster Worker
> #X", and "Client Worker #Y", in my opinion. It's not really a very
> serious problem, but I'm just wondering why it was decided to do the
> renaming, rather than allowing people to name their own threads?

Because people just use Executors.newCachedThreadPool() and then their
thread names don't have much meaning?

Actually you will have 'New I/O server worker #X-Y' and 'New I/O
client worker #X-Y', so you will be able to recognize which threads
are dedicated to cluster or client in your specific case.

However, I agree with you that it would be nice if 'New I/O
(client|server) (boss|worker)' could be customizable.  Perhaps
ThreadRenamingRunnable could be improved so that it does not rename
the current thread completely but append additional information to the
current thread name if a user set the thread name already?

Thanks for an idea,

— Trustin Lee, http://gleamynode.net/