Which NIO library (Netty, Grizzly, kryonet, ...) for simple backend server implementation in Java?

Question

Our frontend is simple Jetty (might be replaced with Tomcat later on) server. Through servlets, we are providing a public HTTP API (more or less RESTful) to expose our product functionality.

In the backend, we have a Java process which does several kind of maintenance tasks. While the backend process usually does it own tasks when it's time, now and then, the frontend needs to wake-up the backend to execute a certain task in the background.

Which (N)IO library would be ideal for this task? I found Netty, Grizzly, kryonet and plain RMI. For now, I am inclined to say Netty, it seems simple to use and it is probably very reliable.

Does any of you have experience in this kind of setups? What would your choice be?

thanks!

[Undertow](http://undertow.io/) is new web server with impressive performance and it is default web server for [Wildfly](http://www.wildfly.org/) application server — bsmk, Jan 22 '14 at 06:15

Sebastien Lorber · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-27T19:05:09.997

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Try to translate this document which answer to your question. http://blog.xebia.fr/2011/11/09/java-nio-et-framework-web-haute-performance/

This society, as french famous Java EE experts, did a lot of poc of NIO servers in the context of a french challenge sponsored by VmWare (USI2011). It was about building a simple quizz app that can handle a load of 1 million connected users.

They won that challenge with great results. Their implementation was Netty + Gemfire and they only replaced the CachedThreadPool by a MemoryAwareThreadPool.

Netty seems to offer great performances, and is well documented.

They also considered Deft, inspired by Tornado (python/facebook) but it's still a bit immature for them

Edit: here's the translated link provided in the comments

edited Aug 27 '13 at 19:05

answered Nov 25 '11 at 13:31

Sebastien Lorber

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This is very interesting. I am going to try to find out why they had to switch to a MemoryAwareThreadPool, since that is not very clear to me. Thanks. – Japer D. Nov 27 '11 at 18:43
Feel free to ask them they'll probably answer (in english). Actually they just figured out that the thread pool was a bottleneck in their application, but perhaps it won't be in your (since the app wasn't a real entreprise app but just a small quizz app with polling and stuff like that) – Sebastien Lorber Nov 28 '11 at 22:48
Translated: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.xebia.fr%2F2011%2F11%2F09%2Fjava-nio-et-framework-web-haute-performance%2F – BAR Aug 27 '13 at 15:56

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 26 '11 at 17:14

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My preference is Netty. It's simple yet flexible. Very fast and the community around Netty is awesome.

answered Nov 26 '11 at 17:14

Mike Heath

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LatencyGuy · Answer 3 · 2015-07-08T20:36:10.070

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The company I work for is currently evaluating CoralReactor. It is a commercial software but it has the easiest API I have ever seen for Java NIO. My personal opinion is that Netty makes things too complicated, especially if you want to go garbage-free and single-threaded, which are a requirement for many companies from the finance, advertisement and game industry.

edited Jul 08 '15 at 20:36

answered Jul 07 '15 at 05:37

LatencyGuy

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 25 '11 at 12:56

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I would decouple them by using JMS, just have some (set of) control queues your backend sits there listening on and you're done. No need to write a custom nio api here.

One sample provider is hornetq. This can be run as an in process jms broker as well, it uses Netty under the covers.

answered Nov 25 '11 at 12:56

Matt

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I think a JSM here would be overkill. If I had multiple servers across different machines, that would be an ideal choose. – Japer D. Nov 27 '11 at 18:44

Which NIO library (Netty, Grizzly, kryonet, ...) for simple backend server implementation in Java?

4 Answers4