New client has tried its best to disconnect writing from the operation. However, we should be able to eliminate even more byte[] allocations for our request by writing to an OutputStream backed by a netty ByteBuf instance. https://github.com/infinispan/protostream/pull/333 should help with this further as it removes the wrapper allocation.

To fully support not even creating a byte[] instance we will need to enhance the ConsistentHash interface to take a ByteBuf as an argument as well.