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Ehcache is used in the following topologies:
Standalone – The cached data set is held in the application node. Any other application nodes are independent with no communication between them. If standalone caching is being used where there are multiple application nodes running the same application, then there is Weak Consistency between them. They contain consistent values for immutable data or after the time to live on an Element has completed and the Element needs to be reloaded.
Distributed Ehcache – The data is held in a Terracotta Server Array with a subset of recently used data held in each application cache node. The distributed topology supports a very rich set of consistency modes.
Replicated – The cached data set is held in each application node and data is copied or invalidated across the cluster without locking. Replication can be either asynchronous or synchronous, where the writing thread blocks while propagation occurs. The only consistency mode available in this topology is Weak Consistency.
Many production applications are deployed in clusters of multiple instances for availability and scalability. However, without a distributed or replicated cache, application clusters exhibit a number of undesirable behaviors, such as:
The following sections further explore distributed and replicated caching.
Ehcache provides distributed caching using the Terracotta Server Array, enabling data sharing among multiple CacheManagers and their caches in multiple JVMs. By combining the power of the Terracotta Server Array with the ease of Ehcache application-data caching, you can:
Using distributed caching is the recommended method of operating Ehcache in a clustered or scaled-out application environment. It provides the highest level of performance, availability, and scalability.
Adding distributed caching to Ehcache takes only two lines of configuration. To get started, see the tutorial for distributed caching with Terracotta.
In addition to the built-in distributed caching, Ehcache has a pluggable cache replication scheme which enables the addition of cache replication mechanisms. The following additional replicated caching mechanisms are available:
Each of the is covered in its own chapter. One solution is to replicate data between the caches to keep them consistent, or coherent. Typical operations which Applicable operations include:
Update supports updateViaCopy or updateViaInvalidate. The latter sends the a remove message out to the cache cluster, so that other caches remove the Element, thus preserving coherency. It is typically a lower cost option than a copy.
Ehcache 1.5 supports the Ehcache Cache Server. To achieve shared data, all JVMs read to and write from a Cache Server, which runs it in its own JVM. To achieve redundancy, the Ehcache inside the Cache Server can be set up in its own cluster. This technique will be expanded upon in Ehcache 1.6.
The best way of notifying of put and update depends on the nature of the cache. If the Element is not available anywhere else then the Element itself should form the payload of the notification. An example is a cached web page. This notification strategy is called copy. Where the cached data is available in a database, there are two choices. Copy as before, or invalidate the data. By invalidating the data, the application tied to the other cache instance will be forced to refresh its cache from the database, preserving cache coherency. Only the Element key needs to be passed over the network. Ehcache supports notification through copy and invalidate, selectable per cache.
Timing scenarios, race conditions, delivery, reliability constraints and concurrent updates to the same cached data can cause inconsistency (and thus a lack of coherency) across the cache instances. This potential exists within the Ehcache implementation. These issues are the same as what is seen when two completely separate systems are sharing a database; a common scenario. Whether data inconsistency is a problem depends on the data and how it is used. For those times when it is important, Ehcache provides for synchronous delivery of puts and updates via invalidation. These are discussed below:
Delivery can be specified to be synchronous or asynchronous. Asynchronous delivery gives faster returns to operations on the local cache and is usually preferred. Synchronous delivery adds time to the local operation, however delivery of an update to all peers in the cluster happens before the cache operation returns.
The default is to update other caches by copying the new value to them. If the replicatePutsViaCopy property is set to false in the replication configuration, puts are made by removing the element in any other cache peers. If the replicateUpdatesViaCopy property is set to false in the replication configuration, updates are made by removing the element in any other cache peers. This forces the applications using the cache peers to return to a canonical source for the data. A similar effect can be obtained by setting the element TTL to a low value such as a second. Note that these features impact cache performance and should not be used where the main purpose of a cache is performance boosting over coherency.
Time To Idle is inconsistent with replicated caching. Time-to-idle makes some entries live longer on some nodes than in others because of cache usage patterns. However, the cache entry "last touched" timestamp is not replicated across the distributed cache. Do not use Time To Idle with distributed caching, unless you do not care about inconsistent data across nodes.
