The 2 APIs are created by a Korean guy - Trustin Lee (who graduated at Yonsei University in Korea). You can visit here (http://kr.linkedin.com/in/trustin) to learn more from him. 10 years IT working experience so far. Really set an example for us IT guys. He is now working at Twitter (should be in America ?). ok let me tell the story about the APIs first..
In year 2004 June, Trustin Lee published network application framework Netty2. It's easy to use but some weakness are revealed after months.
(Actually you can visit : http://mina.apache.org/mina-project/road-map.html)
In year 2004 Sep, Trustin Lee is invited by Alex to build up a new one then he joined Apache... then MINA (Multipurpose Infrastructure Network Application) was released at year 2005?
later in year 200?, Trustin felt boring in Apache then he joined JBoss to contribute the Netty3 deliverable.
About the performance profiling among them, a Chinese guy made a testing just for reference:
http://blog.csdn.net/mindfloating/article/details/8622930
== quoted ==
mina: 需进一步优化其 buffer 分配,避免分配抖动导致的 io 吞吐波动netty: 需进一步优化默认 executor 的实现,降低 cpu 消耗
== unquoted ==
http://deep-fish.iteye.com/blog/1819660
Netty3 study center