Improved handling of large messages using constant memory, via connection throttling

I recently updated the Apache Synapse ESB http/s transport module, and replaced the use of OS Pipes and buffers we had, with shared buffers from the Apache HttpCore/NIO library. Oleg Kalnichevski suggested this approach over an year back, and has helped us immensely over the years, in our efforts to build the fastest open source Enterprise Service Bus around!

This approach uses a constant size shared buffer to read a message from the NIO reactor, into the application processing threads, and signals the channel (i.e. TCP socket) that we are not willing to accept any more data - when this buffer fills up - effectively throttling the connection. This allows us to handle very large messages without requiring loads of heap memory. Now we can handle extremely high concurrency rates, as well as large messages - without dropping any!

Read the latest performance numbers for Apache Synapse ESB / WSO2 ESB here: http://wso2.org/library/3740