Data Container Changes Part 1

Infinispan 9.0 Beta 1 introduces some big changes to the Infinispan data container.  This is the first of two blog posts detailing those changes.

This post will cover the changes to eviction which utilizes a new provider, Caffeine.  As you may already know Infinispan has supported our own implementations of LRU (Least Recently Used) and LIRS (Low Inter-reference Receny Set) algorithms for our bounded caches.

Our implementations of eviction were even rewritten for Infinispan 8, but we found we still had some issues or limitations with them, especially LIRS.  Our old implementation had some problems with keeping the correct number of entries.  The new implementation while not having that issue had others, such as being considerably more complex.  And while it implemented the entire LIRS specification, it could have memory usage issues.  This led us to looking at alternatives and Caffeine seemed like a logical fit as well as being well maintained and the author, Ben Manes, is quite responsive.

Enter Caffeine

Caffeine doesn’t utilize LRU or LIRS for its eviction algorithm and instead implements TinyLFU with an admission window.  This has the benefit of the high hit ratio like LIRS, while also requiring low memory overhead like LRU.  Caffeine also provides custom weighting for objects, which allow us to reuse the code that was developed for MEMORY based eviction as well.

The only thing that Caffeine doesn’t support is our idea of a custom Equivalence.  Thus Infinispan now wraps byte[] instances to ensure equals and hashCode methods work properly.  This also gives us a good opportunity to reevaluate the dataContainer configuration element.

Deprecations

The data container configuration has thus been deprecated and is now replaced by a new configuration element named memory.   Also since we are adding a new element the eviction configuration could also be consolidated into memory, and thus eviction is also deprecated.  And last but not least the storeAsBinary configuration element has also been integrated into the new memory configuration element.  Now we have 1 configuration element instead of 3, can’t beat that!

New Configuration

The new memory configuration will start out pretty simple and new elements can be added as there is a need.  The memory element will be composed of a single sub element that can be of three different choices.  For this post we will go over two of the sub elements: OBJECT and BINARY.

OBJECT

Object storage stores the actual objects as provided from the user in the Java Heap.  This is the default storage method when no memory configuration is provided.  This method will provide the best performance when using operations that operate upon the entire data set, such as distributed streams, indexing and local reads etc.

Unfortunately OBJECT storage only allows for COUNT based eviction as we cannot properly estimate user object types properly.  This could be improved in a feature version if there is enough interest. Note that you can technically configured MEMORY eviction type with the OBJECT storage type with declarative configuration, but it will throw an exception when you build the configuration.  Therefore OBJECT only has a single element named size to determine the amount of entries that can be stored in the cache.

An example of how Object storage can be configured:

XML

DECLARATIVE

BINARY

Binary storage stores the object in its serialized form in a byte array.  This has an interesting side effect of objects are always stored as a deep copy.  This can be useful if you want to modify an object after retrieving it without affecting the underlying cache stored object.  Since objects have to be deserialized when performing operations on them some things such as distributed streams and local gets will be a little bit slower.

A nice benefit of storing entries as BINARY is that we can estimate the total on heap size of the object.  Thus BINARY supports both COUNT and MEMORY based eviction types.

An example of how Binary storage can be configured:

XML

DECLARATIVE

OFF-HEAP

This option will be described in more detail in the next blog post.  Stay tuned!

Conclusion

Caffeine should bring us a great solution, while also reducing a lot of maintenance ourselves.  The new memory configuration also provides a simpler solution by removing two other configuration elements.

We hope you enjoy the new changes to the data container and look out for another blog post coming soon to detail the other new changes to the data container!  In the meantime please check out our latest Infinispan 9.0 before it goes final and give us any feedback on IRC or JIRA

News

Tags

JUGs alpha as7 asymmetric clusters asynchronous beta c++ cdi chat clustering community conference configuration console data grids data-as-a-service database devoxx distributed executors docker event functional grouping and aggregation hotrod infinispan java 8 jboss cache jcache jclouds jcp jdg jpa judcon kubernetes listeners meetup minor release off-heap openshift performance presentations product protostream radargun radegast recruit release release 8.2 9.0 final release candidate remote query replication queue rest query security spring streams transactions vert.x workshop 8.1.0 API DSL Hibernate-Search Ickle Infinispan Query JP-QL JSON JUGs JavaOne LGPL License NoSQL Open Source Protobuf SCM administration affinity algorithms alpha amazon anchored keys annotations announcement archetype archetypes as5 as7 asl2 asynchronous atomic maps atomic objects availability aws beer benchmark benchmarks berkeleydb beta beta release blogger book breizh camp buddy replication bugfix c# c++ c3p0 cache benchmark framework cache store cache stores cachestore cassandra cdi cep certification cli cloud storage clustered cache configuration clustered counters clustered locks codemotion codename colocation command line interface community comparison compose concurrency conference conferences configuration console counter cpp-client cpu creative cross site replication csharp custom commands daas data container data entry data grids data structures data-as-a-service deadlock detection demo deployment dev-preview development devnation devoxx distributed executors distributed queries distribution docker documentation domain mode dotnet-client dzone refcard ec2 ehcache embedded embedded query equivalence event eviction example externalizers failover faq final fine grained flags flink full-text functional future garbage collection geecon getAll gigaspaces git github gke google graalvm greach conf gsoc hackergarten hadoop hbase health hibernate hibernate ogm hibernate search hot rod hotrod hql http/2 ide index indexing india infinispan infinispan 8 infoq internationalization interoperability interview introduction iteration javascript jboss as 5 jboss asylum jboss cache jbossworld jbug jcache jclouds jcp jdbc jdg jgroups jopr jpa js-client jsr 107 jsr 347 jta judcon kafka kubernetes lambda language learning leveldb license listeners loader local mode lock striping locking logging lucene mac management map reduce marshalling maven memcached memory migration minikube minishift minor release modules mongodb monitoring multi-tenancy nashorn native near caching netty node.js nodejs non-blocking nosqlunit off-heap openshift operator oracle osgi overhead paas paid support partition handling partitioning performance persistence podcast presentation presentations protostream public speaking push api putAll python quarkus query quick start radargun radegast react reactive red hat redis rehashing releaase release release candidate remote remote events remote query replication rest rest query roadmap rocksdb ruby s3 scattered cache scripting second level cache provider security segmented server shell site snowcamp spark split brain spring spring boot spring-session stable standards state transfer statistics storage store store by reference store by value streams substratevm synchronization syntax highlighting tdc testing tomcat transactions tutorial uneven load user groups user guide vagrant versioning vert.x video videos virtual nodes vote voxxed voxxed days milano wallpaper websocket websockets wildfly workshop xsd xsite yarn zulip
Posted by Unknown on 2016-12-19
Tags:
back to top