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I need to create a relatively simple Java tcp/ip server and I'm having a little trouble determining if I should use something like Netty or just stick with simple ServerSocket and InputStream/OutputStream.

We really just need to listen for a request, then pass the new client Socket off to some processing code in a new thread. That thread will terminate once the processing is complete and the response is sent.

I like the idea of pipelines, decoders, etc. in Netty, but for such a simple scenario it doesn't seem worth the added up front development time. It seems like a bit overkill for our initial requirements, but I'm a little nervous that there are lots of things I'm not considering. What, if any, are the benefits of Netty for such simple requirements? What am I failing to consider?

jluce50
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    If this is one of your first projects with sockets, use low-level to gain a better understanding. When evaluate higher-level API and choose the one you like more: Netty, Mina, ProtocolBuffers, etc. – Victor Sorokin Dec 06 '11 at 21:26

3 Answers3

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The main advantage of Netty over simply reading from and writing to sockets using streams is that Netty supports non-blocking, asynchronous I/O (using Java's NIO API); when you use streams to read and write from sockets (and you start a new thread for each connected accepted from a ServerSocket) you are using blocking, synchronous I/O.

The Netty approach scales much better, which is important if your system needs to be able to handle many (thousands) of connections at the same time. If your system does not need to scale to many simultaneous connections, it might not be worth the trouble to use a framework like Netty.

Some more background information: Threads are relatively expensive resources in an operating system. Each thread needs memory for the stack (which can be for example 2 MB in size). When you create thousands of threads, this is going to cost a lot of memory; also, operating systems have limits on the number of threads that can be created. So you don't want to start a new thread for each accepted connection. The idea of asynchronous I/O is to decouple the threads from the connections (no one-to-one relation). There can be many more connections than threads, and whenever some event happens on one of the connections (for example, data is received), a thread from a thread pool is temporarily used to handle the event.

Jesper
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I think that the benefits of using netty are not immediate but actually come later when requirements change and maintenance becomes more complex for your project. Netty brings built in understanding of the HTTP protocol so that you can provide simple RESTful web services. Also you have the option of utilizing asynchronous request processing that netty provides as a framework so that you can potentially get better performance and service several orders of magnitude more concurrent requests.

Neil Essy
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First, write the logic of your service so that it's independent of your communication layer.

As Victor Sorokin said, there's a learning advantage to doing it yourself. So it ought to be worthwhile to write it with sockets. It will involve less effort to get started, and if it works well enough then you're off to the races.

If you find that you need more scalability/robustness later, you can switch to netty. Just write a new netty layer that communicates for your service logic layer and swap them out.

BillRobertson42
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