Description Greg Wilkins 2012-01-30 01:23:59 EST

Currently jetty keeps request/response objects associated with a connection and reuses them for each request received.

With modern garbage collectors, this may not be an ideal strategy, as it may encourage request/response object (and their associated objects) to migrate into old generation, since the lifetime of a connection is often be many minutes. 

It may be better to simply recreate new request/response objects for each request. This would free memory while the connection is idle and reduce the chances of those objects ending up in old gen.

Note that Async Servlets and techniques like long polling will fight against this, as they increase the lifespan of request objects.  However protocols like websocket may make long polling less utilised.

Another problem with recycling request/responses/continuations/AsyncContexts, is that it makes it harder to detect programming errors in asynchronous code, which wrongly holds onto a reference beyond the objects lifecycle.

We need to evaluate if recycling is still a net benefit.