Question

I have a netty-based application which listens to multiple tcp ports. So each port is initialized like this

bootstrap = new ServerBootstrap(new NioServerSocketChannelFactory(
            Executors.newCachedThreadPool(), Executors.newFixedThreadPool(Settings.getDemuxPoolSize()),
            Settings.getDemuxPoolSize()));

But having so many thread pools (and I have really many open TCP ports) looks like a waste to me.

Question is: is it safe to use SAME thread pools across multiple server bootstraps in Netty? (Maybe some thread-local channel references, etc.?)

Answer 1

You would better be off to create a WorkerPool and then share it between the different NioServerSocketChannelFactory instances. So you can use the same Workers for different ChannelFactory instances.

Something like:

WorkerPool<NioWorker> workerPool = new NioWorkerPool<NioWorker>(Executors.newCachedThreadPool(), size);
NioServerSocketChannelFactory factory = new NioServerSocketChannelFactory(Executors.newCachedThreadPool(), workerPool);
NioServerSocketChannelFactory factory2 = new NioServerSocketChannelFactory(Executors.newCachedThreadPool(), workerPool);
....