JGroups 3.0.0.Final released

I'm happy to announce that JGroups 3.0.0.Final is here !

While originally intended to make only API changes (some of them queued for years), there are also several optimizations, most of them related to running JGroups in larger clusters.

For instance, the size of several messages has been reduced, and some protocol rounds have been eliminated, making JGroups more memory efficient and less chatty.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been working on making merging of 100-300 cluster nodes faster and making sure a merge never blocks. To this end, I've written a unit test, which creates N singleton nodes (= nodes which only see themselves in the cluster), then make them see each other and wait until a cluster of N has formed.

The test itself was a real challenge because I was hitting the max heap size pretty soon. For example, with 300 members, I had to increase the heap size to at least 900 MB, to make the test complete. This indicates that a JGroups member needs roughly a max of 3MBs of heap. Of course, I had to use shared thread pools, timers and do a fair amount of (memory) tuning on some of the protocols, to accommodate 300 members all running in the same JVM.

Running in such a memory constrained environment led to some more optimizations, which will benefit users, even if they're not running 300 members inside the same JVM ! :-)

One of them is that UNICAST / UNICAST2 maintain a structure for every member they talk to. So if member A sends a unicast to each and every member of a cluster of 300, it'll have 300 connections open.

The change is to close connections that have been idle for a given (configurable) time, and re-establish them when needed.

Further optimizations will be made in 3.1.

The release notes for 3.0.0.Final are here: https://github.com/belaban/JGroups/blob/master/doc/ReleaseNotes-3.0.0.txt. 

JGroups 3.0.0.Final can be downloaded here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/javagroups/files/JGroups/3.0.0.Final

As usual, if you have questions, use one of the mailing lists for questions.

Enjoy !