[AVRO-2090] Improve encode/decode time for SpecificRecord using code generation

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.9.0
• Component/s: java
• Assignee: Raymie Stata
• Reporter: Raymie Stata
• Created: 07/Oct/17 23:52
• Updated: 24/Oct/18 06:35
• Resolved: 23/Oct/18 18:01

Description

New implementation for generation of code for SpecificRecord that improves decoding by over 10% and encoding over 30% (more improvements are on the way). This feature is behind a feature flag (org.apache.avro.specific.use_custom_coders) and (for now) turned off by default. See Getting Started (Java) for instructions.

(A bit more info: Compared to GenericRecords, SpecificRecords offer type-safety plus the performance of traditional getters/setters/instance variables. But these are only beneficial to Java code accessing those records. SpecificRecords inherit serialization and deserialization code from GenericRecords, which is dynamic and thus slow (in fact, benchmarks show that serialization and deserialization is slower for SpecificRecord than for GenericRecord). This patch extends record.vm to generate custom, higher-performance encoder and decoder functions for SpecificRecords.)

Issue Links

• blocks: AVRO-2093 Extend "custom coders" to fully support union types
• blocks: AVRO-2094 Extend "custom coders" to support logical types
• blocks: AVRO-2091 Eliminate org.apache.avro.specific.use_custom_coder feature flag
• blocks: AVRO-2092 Flip default value of org.apache.avro.specific.use_custom_coder to true
• is blocked by: AVRO-2235 Regenerate TestRecordWithLogicalTypes
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #256
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #256
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #350