Shard transport options for DSE Search communications

The netty non-blocking communications layer was the previous default. After the upgrade to 5.0, all nodes switch to use internode messaging options.

A custom, TCP-based communications layer for Solr was the default type in DataStax Enterprise and provided an alternative to the slower more resource intensive HTTP-based, Tomcat-backed interface.

The netty communications layer improves DSE Search inter-node communications in several ways:

• Lowers latency
• Reduces resource consumption
• Increases throughput even while handling thousands of concurrent requests
• Provides nonblocking I/O processing

To avoid distributed deadlock during queries, do not use the HTTP-based communications. DataStax recommends using Inter-node messaging.

The TCP-based communications layer for DSE Search supports client-to-node and node-to-node encryption using SSL, but does not support Kerberos.

DataStax Enterprise 5.0 implements an internode messaging system that provides the same benefits of the shard transport, but is widely used by all DataStax Enterprise components. For upgrade impact, see Upgrading DataStax Enterprise.