[JAMES-3555] Allow 'real' streaming upon BlobStore reads

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 3.6.0
• Component/s: Blob
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Benoit Tellier
• Created: 08/Apr/21 06:19
• Updated: 08/Apr/21 06:19

Description

I investigated a build instability... https://github.com/apache/james-project/pull/370

One time out of 25 the uploaded content was altered (Different SHA 256 in
the data store). Several Apache CI builds had been failing because of this.

Investigating this, I found that a piped input stream strategy was not
hitting this pitfall (RectorUtils::toInputStream). I thus incriminate
some weird data races on the Reactor side...

Other areas of the code are likely affected as both the Cassandra and the
S3 blobStores relies on those for streaming (only relied upon for
attachment upload).

Changing the BlobStore API should likely be considered:

public interface BlobStore {
    Flux<ByteBuffer> read(BucketName bucketName, BlobId blobId);
}

Why:

• Supported by both implementation (Cassandra S3)
• Avoids intermediate transformations requiring blocking
  operations/dedicated thread resources
• We convert a Flux[ByteBuffer] => InputStream (to conform to BlobStore API) => Flux[ByteBuffer] (reactor-netty layer)