Workerman VS Netty

I remember a consulting gig where they were pushing 50k requests per second with PHP in a 2018 laptop by using this framework https://github.com/walkor/workerman

In a real application, with database connection pooling and auth sessions, it went down to 15k requests/s.

And that was PHP7. PHP8 introduced JIT so it's probably significantly faster these days and hopefully fully typed.

The code above is an example of creating a websocket server from the usage example on the workerman/workerman page on github.

Workerman

That's cute. I managed to get 100k requests per second on a single i7 CPU this week using standard blocking code with Workerman. Zero added cognitive load. It also does DB pooling, workers, sockets and consumes relatively lower memory than other solutions.

Code of netty is here and using following library

We use Netty (https://netty.io/) as the source of the MQTT communication, and we build the MQTT features the MQTT broker should support ourselves on top of that.

In this space, we also have the somewhat related term blocking. Java's NIO library is one well-known non-blocking tool used for managing multiple tasks on a single Java thread. When listening to sockets, most of the time a thread is just blocked, doing nothing until it receives some data. So, it's efficient to use a single thread for monitoring many sockets, to increase the likelihood of the thread having some actual work to do. The Selector API does this but is notoriously challenging to program well. Instead, developers use frameworks like Netty which abstract some of NIO's complexity and layer on some best practices.

DirectByteBuffer exhibits an intriguing behavior: it deallocates its backing memory during the finalization process, which occurs after garbage collection (GC) cycles. This poses an issue if your system is conservative with on-heap allocations, leading to infrequent GC cycles. In such cases, there could be a significant delay between the time the memory becomes unreferenced and when it is actually deallocated. This behavior could, in some respects, mimic a memory leak.

This is why some libraries hacks into DirectByteBuffer to deallocate memory explicitly, bypassing the finalizer altogether. For instance, the Netty library has implemented such a workaround, see Netty as an [example](https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/795db4a866401aa172757b95...).

Apologies replying to myself, but Netty, which underpins many of the popular Java backend frameworks, see backward compatibility as more important than supporting green threads.

https://github.com/netty/netty/issues/12816

It'll be interesting to see who (if anyone) picks up Netty's mantle in the Project Loom world.

Looks fairly recent so I'm glad I had a pre oct22 build https://github.com/netty/netty/issues/12737

This is better? https://github.com/netty/netty/blob/4.1/pom.xml

Given the fact that Lettuce is built with Netty, we also immediately noticed quite an impact on the initialization time (cold start) of our lambda function. Netty is really fast while executing, but takes a bit of time to initialize. The new Lambda Snapstart functionality might help with that.