APNS messaging with Netty 5.0

Introduction

This document covers how to use the netty based apns client which gives very high througput.

Features

High Througput
Select between single and batch transport
Scalable
Less memory consumption and added value of Netty's features
Zero copy implemented by Netty used heavily to reduce cpu overhead on network writes.
Interfaces for executing Feedback responses in different executor thread.
Configurable properties
Achieved 500K per m1.large nodes(4 core 8 GB)

Get Started

APNS-Netty is a project which is built on Spring 3 and Netty. The goodness of both frameworks are used but mostly netty weighs up. This uses the latest Netty 5.0 .

To get started you can create a maven project and load the apnsAppContext.xml through the followig code.

AbstractApplicationContext appContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("apnsAppContext.xml"); appContext.registerShutdownHook();

Please do configure CONFIG_BASE environment variable and create an empty property file in CONFIG_BASE/apns/apns.properties.

Model

2 Queues are intialized in code. These queues are used to get batch or single messages as inputs. The processing logic picks them either as a batch or as single and send this to APNS.

How to create a batch and push messages to APNS?

final BatchMessageQueue batchMessageQueue = (BatchMessageQueue) appContext .getBean( ApplicationContextComponents.BATCH_MESSAGE_QUEUE);

            final BatchApnsConnection bConn = (BatchApnsConnection) appContext
                    .getBean(
                            ApplicationContextComponents.BATCH_CONNECTION);

            final BatchIdentifierGenerator batchIdentifierGenerator = (BatchIdentifierGenerator) appContext
                    .getBean(
                            ApplicationContextComponents.BATCH_IDENTIFIER_GENERATOR);


            final BatchFullMessage bfm = new BatchFullMessage();

            for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
                final ApnsMessage.Builder builder = new ApnsMessage.Builder();
                
                builder.deviceToken("xyz");
                
                builder.payLoad("{\"aps\" : {\"alert\" : \"Reds trying to hold on to lead."
                                + i
                                + "\",\"badge\" : 9,\"sound\" : \"bingbong.aiff\"},\"acme1\" : \"bar\",\"acme2\" : 42}");
                builder.expTime((int) (Calendar.getInstance()
                        .getTimeInMillis() / 1000 + 86400));
                builder.id(batchIdentifierGenerator.newIdentifier());
                builder.prio((byte) 10);

                bfm.addInvMessages(builder.build());
            }
            batchMessageQueue.pushQueue(bfm);

Configuration

All the configurations are available in default.properties in classpath.

For dealing with APNS you need a PKCS12 security file. The location of which has to be specified in the external configuration file(apns.properties).

APNSConfig.certificatePath=apns/apnscerts/apn_developer_identity.p12

Additionally you can override all the properties in default.properties in the external configuration file.

Configuration to connect to APNS

APNSConfig.certificatePath=apns/apnscerts/apn_developer_identity.p12

APNSConfig.production=false

APNSConfig.password=xyzabcd

Batch related

Total channels to be created is batchProcssConnCount + batchAcceptConnCount

APNSConfig.batchProcssConnCount=50

APNSConfig.batchAcceptConnCount=25

Total number of threads in event loop

APNSConfig.batchProcessingCount=20

Max queue size

APNSConfig.maxBatchQueueSize=10000

Max queue poller threads

APNSConfig.maxBatchQueuePollerThreads=100

Single queue

APNSConfig.maxQueueSize=30000

Conclusion

Please send in your comments.

cloudbow/apns-netty