Is there a way to control the number of bytes read in Reactor Netty's TcpClient? - spring-webflux

Question

I am using TcpClient to connect to a simple TCP echo server. Messages consist of the message size in 4 bytes followed by the message itself. For instance, to send the message "hello", the server will expect "0005hello", and respond with "0005hello".
When testing under load (approximately 300+ concurrent users), adjacent requests sometimes result in responses "piling up", e.g. sending "0004good" followed by "0003day" might result in the client receiving "0004good0003" followed by "day".
In a conventional, non-WebFlux-based TCP client, one would normally read the first 4 bytes from the socket into a buffer, determine the length of the message N, then read the following N bytes from the socket into a buffer, before returning the response. Is it possible to achieve such fine-grained control, perhaps by using TcpClient's underlying Channel?
I have also considered the approach of accumulating responses in some data structure (Queue, StringBuffer, etc.) and having a daemon parse the result, but this has not had the desired performance in practice.

Answer 1

I solved this by adding a handler of type LengthFieldBasedFrameDecoder to the Connection:
TcpClient.create()
.host(ADDRESS)
.port(PORT)
.doOnConnected((connection) -> {
connection.addHandler("parseLengthFromFirstFourBytes", new LengthFieldBasedFrameDecoder(9999, 0, 4) {
#Override
protected long getUnadjustedFrameLength(ByteBuf buf, int offset, int length, ByteOrder order) {
ByteBuf lengthBuffer = buf.copy(0, 4);
byte[] messageLengthBytes = new byte[4];
lengthBuffer.readBytes(messageLengthBytes);
String messageLengthString = new String(messageLengthBytes);
return Long.parseLong(messageLengthString);
}
});
})
.connect()
.subscribe();
This solves the issue with the caveat that responses still "pile up" (as described in the question) when the application is subjected to sufficient load.