Netty 4 support in Finagle

It’s been quite a while since the Netty 4 migration in Finagle was initially announced. We’ve travelled a long way and are happy to announce that there is now (as of Finagle 6.42) support for Netty 4 transports in most of the protocols: Thrift, ThriftMux, Memcached, MySQL, Kestrel, and Redis. Both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 are coming soon!

How to enable Netty 4?

While we have not yet defaulted to Netty 4, we’ve been running it in production for several months and have gained enough confidence to publicize the availability of the alternative transports in Finagle.

We encourage Finagle users to try out the new Netty 4 transports for their protocols and jump on the fast track to upcoming changes around resiliency (think of HTTP/2) and performance (think of a reduced allocation profile and better threading model in Netty 4).

To switch the transport over to Netty 4 supply the following command line flag:

-Dcom.twitter.finagle.toggle.flag.overrides=com.twitter.$protocol.UseNetty4=1.0

Where $protocol is one of the following: mux (use this for ThriftMux), thrift, mysql, memcached, kestrel.

This command line flag overrides a feature toggle that is evaluated at application startup and is global for all clients/servers running on the same JVM instance.

Note that Netty 4 is already enabled by default in finagle-redis so no need for an extra CLI flag.

What about HTTP/1.1?

HTTP/1.1 on Netty 4 is still a work in progress. There are known limitations for HTTP clients, but we’ve been successfully running finagle-http servers with Netty 4 in production for several weeks and on TwitterServer’s admin interface for several months.

We feel confident in HTTP/1.1 servers running Netty 4 and encourage you to migrate now using the toggle override. Please note that this will also switch HTTP clients running in the same JVM process over to Netty 4, which we do not recommend at this point.

-Dcom.twitter.finagle.toggle.flag.overrides=com.twitter.http.UseNetty4=1.0

What about HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 (i.e., finagle-http2) should be considered beta as there are known issues with the ALPN support. We’re hoping to roll out a feature-complete HTTP/2 implementation in the next couple of months. In the meantime, HTTP/2 support can be experimentally enabled on any Finagle HTTP client or server as shown below.

import com.twitter.finagle.Http

val client = Http.client
  .configured(Http.Http2)
  .newService("www.example.com:80")

What’s next?

We’re quite optimistic about enabling Netty 4 by default in the next couple of months. Even though we’re not there yet, we feel very proud of the work we’ve done and the progress we’ve made. It took us several years of engineering effort to be able to start serving Netty 4 traffic in production.

Where to report problems?