Ehcache 3: JSR-107 on steroids at Devoxx Morocco

@ljacomet#DevoxxMA #ehcache
Ehcache 3
JSR-107 on steroids
Louis Jacomet - Lead Software Engineer

Who am I?
• Louis Jacomet
• Software engineer, closer to 40 than 20 and still coding!
• @ Terracotta (Software AG) since 2013
• Working on Ehcache mostly
• Team manager and fiddling in infrastructure
• No idea how to do a (nice) UI, especially a web one
• Enjoys concurrency, API design and hard problems

And what about you?
• Who knows nothing about caching?
• Who already uses caching in production?
• Who had production problems related to
caching?
• Who knows about JCache?

Agenda
•Caching and JSR-107
•Ehcache past and present
•Ehcache 3 future

Caching and JSR-107

Caching
• Data structure holding a temporary copy of data
• Trade off between higher memory usage and
reduced latency
• Targets
• Data which is reused
• Data which is expensive to compute / retrieve

Caches all over the place
CPU
Browser
Network
Disk

What should I cache?
• Keys
• Proper equals/
hashcode
• Immutable
• Small(ish)
• Value
• Proper equals/
hashcode
• Ideally immutable
• Think concurrent
otherwise
• Size matters

JSR-107 javax.cache
• Java Community Process driven standard
• Specifies API and semantics for temporary,  
in-memory caching of Java objects,
including object creation, shared access,
spooling, invalidation, and consistency
across JVM's

JSR-107 Features
• CacheManager / Cache
• Expiration
• Creation/Access/
Update
• Integration
• CacheLoader /
Writer
• CacheEntryListener
• Created/Updated
• Removed/Expired
• Get old value
• Entry processor
• Annotations
• MBeans, exposing
• Configuration
• Statistics
• No capacity control !

JSR-107 gotcha’s
• MutableConfiguration
• Always invoke
MutableConfiguration.setTypes(Class, Class)
• Otherwise Cache only knows about Object
• Adding a CacheLoader factory is not enough -
need to invoke setReadThrough(boolean)

JSR-107 gotcha’s (2)
• Compare and Swap operations with a CacheLoader
• Loader is ignored
• putIfAbsent checks Cache only, not underlying
system of record
• Results in a weird contract

Ehcache past and
present

A bit of history
• Announced in November 2003 on
• v1.0 released on September 2004
• Only a few days before Java 5 and generics
• Acquired in 2009 by
• v2.0 released in March 2010
• Terracotta acquired in 2011 by

Storage model: tiers
• Multiple storage tiers
• Heap: like objects in a regular hash map
• Off-heap: binary form stored outside of
Garbage Collector reach
• Disk: binary form stored on disk
• Clustered: binary form stored on other
server(s)

Overflow model
Heap
Disk

Heap
Disk
Overflow model

Disk
Heap
Overflow model

Authoritative tier model
Heap
Disk

Disk
Heap

Heap
Disk

Why the new model?
• Predictable latency
• Every put pays the price of the lower /
slowest tier
• No degradation when a higher tier gets full
• Preserves fast(er) access for hot set
• When a mapping is accessed it moves to the
fastest tier available

Not a cache feature?
• Search
• What does searching on a hot set means?
• Even without interacting with the cache, two
execution of the same query could return different
results
• Pinning
• Prevent eviction from cache entries
• May adversly effect the ability of the cache to
respect size constraints

Ehcache 3
The future is here

Lifecycle - explicit
• CacheManager
• init / close methods
• create and close caches
• PersistentCacheManager
• Maintenance mode
• Destroy cache data

Cache<K, V> for proper typing
• Ehcache 2.x not generic, was time to change
that
• Needs to be known at runtime
• No one wants a ClassCastException
• Cache data may live beyond application
lifecycle
• Usage show that frequently key and values are
of the same type in a given cache

Serialization
• Required as soon as we move away from the
heap
• Fully customisable in Ehcache 3

CacheLoaderWriter
• Enables the cache-through pattern
• Consistent across all cache operations
• Single interface
• Loader only - make sure write related
methods throw
• Writer only - what?
• Anyone having a good use case for this -
talk to us

Cache through - miss
Application Cache
Database

Cache through - hit
Application Cache
Database

Cache through - write
Application Cache
Database

Write behind
• Enables scaling your writes
• Putter does not pay for write latency
• Batching and coalescing options
• Simplified compared to 2.x - no more sizing
gotchas

Application Cache
Database
queue
Write behind

Application Cache
Database
queue
Write behind - eviction
(K1,V1)
(K1,V1)

Application Cache
Database
queue
Write behind - eviction
(K1,V1)

Write behind - failure
Application Cache
queue
Database

Database

queue
Database

Expiry
• Offers context

Eviction Veto and Prioritizer
• Veto
• Enables to suggest a veto on certain mappings
• Prioritizer
• Allows to sort sample before picking eviction
victim
• Not applicable to all stores
• Both are hints only - capacity always takes priority

Transactions
• Full blown XA resource
• includes recovery support
• Needs work for transaction managers
integration
• Code isolated in its own module
• Currently part of the main Ehcache 3 jar

Clustering using Terracotta

Automatic Resource Control
• Enables sizing in natural units
• n bytes on heap
• Percentage of the max heap available
• Define resource pools at the cache manager
• Cross eviction amongst caches
• Enables auto balancing

Resilience strategy
• A cache is to be resilient
• Yet… sh*t happens
• Storage failures
• SLA violations (timeouts?)
• Very explicit contract at this time
• To be refined when clustering is wrapping up

Q&A
Thank you for your time

Ehcache 3: JSR-107 on steroids at Devoxx Morocco

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