How would you integrate Netty with Java virtual threads?

A virtual thread per connection is a reasonable design to consider, but it is a different architecture from keeping Netty as the networking layer and integrating virtual threads with it. If Netty is mandatory, the integration has to work within that constraint rather than just replace it.

Virtual threads make this style more accessible in Java, but the underlying idea is not new. Fibers and other stackful lightweight thread models have been around for a long time.

Be careful with performance comparisons across systems that use different concurrency models. For example, a comparison with PostgreSQL does not by itself tell you whether a virtual thread per connection would perform well, since PostgreSQL does not use lightweight threads.