A prototype Netty embedded servlet bridge for Spring Boot.

Includes basic filter and servlet support. I'm fairly new to Spring Boot, but this approach seems to fit it's opinionated view of the servlet container. Async servlet support isn't yet completed.

Performance

Use the runTestApp Gradle task to start the server with the same configuration used here. Tests run with wrk with the following arguments:

wrk -H 'Host: localhost' -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -d 120 -c 32 -t 2 http://localhost:8080/plaintext

Tomcat 7.0.55

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/plaintext
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency    22.96ms  115.34ms 628.47ms   96.50%
    Req/Sec    16.33k     4.74k   34.44k    83.57%
  3691775 requests in 2.00m, 497.09MB read
Requests/sec:  30764.62
Transfer/sec:      4.14MB

Tomcat 8.0.9

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/plaintext
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency   114.10ms  745.91ms   5.04s    97.75%
    Req/Sec    15.67k     2.99k   27.56k    91.68%
  3553322 requests in 2.00m, 478.45MB read
  Socket errors: connect 0, read 0, write 0, timeout 3
Requests/sec:  29611.00
Transfer/sec:      3.99MB

Prototype Netty 4.0 Bridge

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/plaintext
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     1.14ms    6.64ms 128.33ms   99.33%
    Req/Sec    19.64k     4.16k   45.22k    83.96%
  4459068 requests in 2.00m, 331.69MB read
Requests/sec:  37158.91
Transfer/sec:      2.76MB

Note: Difference in transfer/sec is due to Server and Date headers returned by Tomcat

Prototype Netty 4.1 Beta 1 Bridge

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/plaintext
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     1.09ms    7.58ms 200.99ms   99.80%
    Req/Sec    19.14k     2.19k   39.89k    84.44%
  4366902 requests in 2.00m, 408.12MB read
Requests/sec:  36390.84
Transfer/sec:      3.40MB

When compared to a null servlet:

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/null
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency   820.84us    3.47ms  66.04ms   99.70%
    Req/Sec    26.03k     4.27k   45.44k    69.68%
  5894335 requests in 2.00m, 505.91MB read
Requests/sec:  49119.58

And to serving the response directly from Netty:

Running 2m test @ http://localhost:8080/nullnetty
  2 threads and 32 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     2.01ms   23.54ms 400.01ms   99.65%
    Req/Sec    27.21k     4.26k   41.44k    66.08%
  6164886 requests in 2.00m, 223.41MB read
Requests/sec:  51374.16

Prototype Netty 4.1 Beta 3 Bridge (Commit eb531c6)