We don't need to touch any other ByteBuf as Phantombot uses SimpleChannelInboundHandler where Netty automatically starts the cleaning of these input buffers at the end of the pipeline (when calling ctx.fireChannelRead()).

For our writes into the channel we do not need to deal with any releases as this will be handled by the HttpObjectEncoder once the write has completed. (Anything else would anyhow not make sense as we'd release all references before the encoder could handle it)

Additionally, it seems the current request logger was not functional since a while (at least older versions did not logg either when I tried). Thus I took the liberty to also rewrite/fix it and make it option as to slim down the channel pipeline for each request.
Moreover I've moved the handler to fitting position in the pipeline so we can also logg any TLS request. Before only raw bytes could have been read as it was so early in the pipeline

Anything else should be pretty much similar to the previously expected behavior. A sample log looks as follows:

=== HTTP REQUEST === 2026-01-14_21:23:02.807672900 === HTTP REQUEST ===
Remote: 127.0.0.1:39139
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Method: GET
URI: /panel/pages/loyalty/channelpoints.html?_=1768425692645
Headers:
  Host: <REDACTED>
  Connection: keep-alive
  Pragma: no-cache
  Cache-Control: no-cache
  sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"
  X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/143.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/143.0.0.0
  Accept: text/html, */*; q=0.01
  sec-ch-ua: "Microsoft Edge";v="143", "Chromium";v="143", "Not A(Brand";v="24"
  DNT: 1
  sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0
  Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
  Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors
  Sec-Fetch-Dest: empty
  Referer: <REDACTED>
  Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
  Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,de-DE;q=0.7,de;q=0.6,es-ES;q=0.5,es;q=0.4
  Cookie: <REDACTED>
  content-length: 0

As for Head Space we stick close to the minimally required 70MB Phantombot needs to run

With a metaspace of about 100MB and all other stuff like Thread stacks I stay nicely under 300MB (on Windows) even with spamming the before mentioned big video files