How does the Netty threading model work in the case of many client connections?

Question

I intend to use Netty in an upcoming project. This project will act as both client and server. Especially it will establish and maintain many connections to various servers while at the same time serving its own clients.

Now, the documentation for NioServerSocketChannelFactory fairly specifies the threading model for the server side of things fairly well - each bound listen port will require a dedicated boss thread throughout the process, while connected clients will be handled in a non-blocking fashion on worker threads. Specifically, one worker thread will be able to handle multiple connected clients.

However, the documentation for NioClientSocketChannelFactory is less specific. This also seems to utilize both boss and worker threads. However, the documentation states:

One NioClientSocketChannelFactory has one boss thread. It makes a connection attempt on request. Once a connection attempt succeeds, the boss thread passes the connected Channel to one of the worker threads that the NioClientSocketChannelFactory manages.

Worker threads seem to function in the same way as for the server case too.

My question is, does this mean that there will be one dedicated boss thread for each connection from my program to an external server? How will this scale if I establish hundreds, or thousands of such connections?

As a side note. Are there any adverse side effects for re-using a single Executor (cached thread pool) as both the bossExecutor and workerExecutor for a ChannelFactory? What about also re-using between different client and/or server ChannelFactory instances? This is somewhat discussed here, but I do not find those answers specific enough. Could anyone elaborate on this?

Solution 1

This is not a real answer to your question regarding how the Netty client thread model works. But you can use the same NioClientSocketChannelFactory to create single ClientBootstrap with multiple ChannelPipelineFactorys , and in turn make a large number of connections. Take a look at the example below.

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    String host = "localhost";
    int port = 8090;
    ChannelFactory factory = new NioClientSocketChannelFactory(Executors
            .newCachedThreadPool(), Executors.newCachedThreadPool());
    MyHandler handler1 = new MyHandler();
    PipelineFactory factory1 = new PipelineFactory(handler1);
    AnotherHandler handler2 = new AnotherHandler();
    PipelineFactory factory2 = new PipelineFactory(handler2);
    ClientBootstrap bootstrap = new ClientBootstrap(factory);
    // At client side option is tcpNoDelay and at server child.tcpNoDelay
    bootstrap.setOption("tcpNoDelay", true);
    bootstrap.setOption("keepAlive", true);
    for (int i = 1; i<=50;i++){
        if(i%2==0){
            bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(factory1);
        }else{
            bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(factory2);
        }

        ChannelFuture future = bootstrap.connect(new InetSocketAddress(host,
                port));

        future.addListener(new ChannelFutureListener()
        {
            @Override
            public void operationComplete(ChannelFuture future) throws Exception
            {
                future.getChannel().write("SUCCESS");
            }
        });
    }
}

It also shows how different pipeline factories can be set for different connections, so based on the connection you make you can tweak your encoders/decoders in the channel pipeline.

Solution 2

I am not sure your question has been answer. Here's my answer: there's a single Boss thread that is managing simultaneously all the pending CONNECTs in your app. It uses nio to process all the current connects in a single (Boss) thread, and then hands each successfully connected channel off to one of the workers.