> > I am beginning to think we might be on different pages here. Someone from > outside the selector calls selector.select(), and all selector's > functionality is handled within the context of the calling thread. So where > is the need for the extra thread here? More specifically, in the > SSLSelector case, a call to its select, ends up usually to a call to its > inner selector.select(), always in the context of the calling thread ... so > same thing again. Why do you think another thread is necessary here (within > the selector itself)? >
That implies multiple threads using 1 selector. That can be very dangerous and prone to bugs. Even with SSL, I would shy away from making something like that unless putting it behind some library/abstraction like netty, webpieces channelmanager or something. In fact, the performance of 1 thread that runs the selector who dishes the work to a threadpool immediately (N sockets to X threads) has been amazing!!! *It was even better than multiple threads on a selector we found.* This was because that caused lots of contention with locks(slowing it down). The contention depended on the application as some apps had more contention than others. I would highly advise just sticking 1 thread on the selector dishing out to a thread pool which removed all contention to streamline the whole process for speed. THEN, if you do have a threadpool and an simple implementation that runs the data serially per socket in the threadpool(this is quite easy to do), you can do the decryption in the threadpool as well. webpieces impl does this as well. just my 2 cents, later, Dean
