Add Support for Direct Buffers

[reactor]

Add Support for Direct Buffers

[jbrisbin]

We currently do pooling in two different places internally in Reactor and we use two different methods. Maybe we should create a generic pool abstraction that could be used in both.

In BlockingQueueDispatcher, the Tasks are pooled using a fixed size BlockingQueue and a yielding loop to acquire new ones when the pool is exhausted. The ThreadPoolExecutorDispatcher actually uses a RingBuffer to pool the tasks. I think either is a decent solution though I would probably lean toward the RingBuffer approach because of the ability to reuse something like that in many places. The downside to the RingBuffer is that it burns a thread for every one you create because it needs a loop to do the slot accounting.

But assuming we won't be creating a large number of pools, we could use a RingBuffer to pool objects and simply use that in the NIO code and replace the code that does Task pooling in the Dispatchers with this new pool object.

[jbrisbin]

This issue is now obsolete.