Viking Async Sighting

The Viking (aka Erik Onnen) spied AsyncWeb.

From AsyncWeb home page (bold emphasis mine):

The majority of today's popular java HTTP engines are built around the J2EE Servlet Specification - and are inherently synchronous in their operation. The typical order of play is that an individual HTTP connection is mapped to a thread of execution which reads data from the underlying socket, parses the request and forwards it up through the web container to the target Servlet - blocking until a response is completed.

As processing latency (as described above) increases, a real scalability problem is encountered: To increase throughput, it is necessary to increase the number of connection threads. This, however, is not the best way to scale - and depending on the JVM / operating system employed, having a very large number of threads can become a big problem very quickly.

A real problem then needed to be solved: How can we obtain a very high throughput - whilst dealing with high processing latency - without requiring a potentially unbounded number of threads? An initial area of investigation was to provide a NIO transport connector for an existing HTTP engine. However, existing popular HTTP engines built around the J2EE Servlet Specification have a blocking synchronous architecture throughout. Swapping in a NIO transport to such an engine does not solve the problem: We'd still need to scale processing threads in order to push requests up through the container.

What was needed was an http engine which provided non-blocking behaviour throughout - and so work began on writing such an engine.

Looks like AsyncWeb has been heading for Apache MINA for some time. Apache MINA is a network application framework which helps users develop high performance and high scalability network applications easily. It provides an abstract · event-driven · asynchronous API over various transports such as TCP/IP and UDP/IP via Java NIO.