netty EpollEventLoopGroup vs NioEventLoopGroup, which should I choose on CentOS 6?

Question

I'm using netty 4.1.0CR, the official code samples suggest me to use NioEventLoopGroup to start a server as well as client, as following:

EventLoopGroup bossGroup = new NioEventLoopGroup(1);
EventLoopGroup workerGroup = new NioEventLoopGroup();
ServerBootstrap b = new ServerBootstrap();
b.group(bossGroup, workerGroup);

But I'm running both server and client on Linux(CentOS 6), should I use EpollEventLoopGroup to get better performance? Or how could I decide which one to use?

Answer 1

If you are running on linux you can use EpollEventLoopGroup and so get better performance, less GC and have more advanced features that are only available on linux.

Answer 2

Netty provides the following platforms in specific JNI transports:

Linux (since 4.0.16)
MacOS/BSD (since 4.1.11)

These JNI transports add features specific to a particular platform, generate less garbage, and generally improve performance when compared to the NIO based transport.

For more information check Netty Native transports