Friday, 02 November 2018
Near caching with Spring-Boot and Infinispan
We have recently released infinispan-spring-boot-starter 2.0.0.Final. This version supports Spring Boot 2.1 and Infinispan 9.4.0.Final.
Before this release, some important features - such as near caching - were only configurable by code. From now on, we can set all of the Hot Rod client configuration using the hotrod.properties file or the Spring application YAML. The latter is an important community requirement we had.
Let’s see how to speed up our applications performance with near caching!
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Hot Rod
Just as a quick reminder, Infinispan can be used embedded in your application or in client/server mode. To connect you application to a server you can use an Infinispan Client and the Infinispan “Hot Rod Protocol”. Other protocols are available, such as REST, but Hot Rod is the most recommended way since it is the one that supports most of the Infinispan functionalities.
Near cache
From the Infinispan documentation: Hot Rod client can keep a local cache that stores recently used data. Enabling near caching can significantly improve the performance of read operations get and getVersioned since data can potentially be located locally within the Hot Rod client instead of having to go remote.
When should I use it?
Near caching can improve the performance of an application when most of the accesses to a given cache are read-only and the accessed dataset is relatively small. When an application is doing lots of writes to a cache, invalidations, evictions and updates to the near cache need to happen. In this scenario we won’t probably get much benefit.
As I said in the introduction, the good news is that this feature can be activated just by configuration. Code doesn’t change, so we can measure the benefits, if such exist, in a very straightforward way.
Spring-Boot
I have created a very simple application, available here. Maven, Java 8 and an Infinispan server are required to run it. You can download the server or use docker.
Docker: docker run -it -p 11222:11222 jboss/infinispan-server:9.4.0.Final
Standalone: PATH/infinispan-server-9.4.0.Final/bin/standalone.sh
Once the server is up and running, build the application using maven
>> infinispan-near-cache: mvn clean install
Activating the near cache
I need to configure two properties:
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Near Cache Mode: DISABLED or INVALIDATED. Default value is DISABLED, so I turn it on with INVALIDATED.
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Max Entries: Integer value that sets the max size of the near caches. There is no default value, so I set up one.
The hotrod client configuration is for each client, not for each cache (this might change in the future). With that in mind, note that configuring the previous properties will activate near caching for all the caches. If you need to activate it just for some of them, add the following property:
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Cache Name Pattern: String pattern. For example "i8n-.*" will activate the near caching for all the caches whose name starts by "i8n-".
Configuration can be placed in the hotrod-client.properties, Spring-boot configuration or code.
Results
My dataset contains 25 contributors. If I activate the near cache with max 12 entries and I run my reader again, I get the job done in ~1900 milliseconds, which is already an improvement. If I configure it to hold the complete dataset, I get it done in ~220 milliseconds, which is a big one!
Conclusions
Near caching can help us speed up our client applications if configured properly. We can test our tuning easily because we only need to add some configuration to the client. Finally, the Spring-Boot Infinispan Starter helps us build services with Spring-Boot and Infinispan.
Further work will be done to help Spring-Boot users work with Infinispan, so stay tuned! Any feedback on the starter or any requirement from the community is more that welcome. Find us in Zulip Chat for direct contact or post your questions in StackOverflow!
Tags: hotrod near caching spring spring boot
Wednesday, 11 January 2017
Near Cache for native C++/C# Client example
Dear Readers,
as mentioned in our previous post about the new C++/C# release 8.1.0.Beta1, clients are now equipped with near cache support.
The near cache is an additional cache level that keeps the most recently used cache entries in an "in memory" data structure. Near cached objects are synchronized with the remote server value in the background and can be get as fast as a map[] operation.
So, your client tends to periodically focus the operations on a subset of your entries? This feature could be of help: it’s easy to use, just enable it and you’ll have near cache seamless under the wood.
A C++ example of a cache with near cache configuration
The last line does the magic, the INVALIDATED mode is the active mode for the near cache (default mode is DISABLED which means no near cache, see Java docs), maxEntries is the maximum number of entries that can be stored nearly. If the near cache is full the oldest entry will be evicted. Set maxEntries=0 for unbounded cache (do you have enough memory?) Now a full example of application that just does some gets and puts and counts how many of them are served remote and how many are served nearly. As you can see the cache object is an instance of the "well known" RemoteCache class
Entries values in the near cache are kept aligned with the remote cache state via the events subsystem: if something changes in the server, an update event (modified, expired, removed) is sent to the client that updates the cache accordingly.
By the way: do you know that C++/C# clients can subscribe listener to events? In the next "native" post we will see how.
Cheers! and thank you for reading.
Tags: c++ hotrod near caching 8.1.0 cpp-client dotnet-client c#
Monday, 30 March 2015
Infinispan 7.2.0.Beta2 released with better default configuration handling
We’ve just released Infinispan 7.2.0.Beta2 which adds better support for determining which configuration options have been defined by the user versus those options that contain default values. This is an important stepping stone in our aim to enable partial configuration overlays and proper configuration template support.
On top of that, we’ve added the capability for Java Hot Rod clients to recover from full cluster restarts and fixed an important topology transfer bug that lead to ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException exceptions when applying topology changes.
Finally, in order to provide better out-of-the-box experience with Near Caches in Java Hot Rod client, we have made mandatory to define the maximum number of entries Near Caches should have. Previously, Near Caches were configured to be unbounded by default which would have resulted in memory leaks unless the client removed them by calling RemoteCache.remove() or similar. A configuration exceptions is reported now if no maximum size has been defined in the Java Hot Rod client, but the user can still provide a 0 or negative value to indicate the Near Caches should be unbounded.
For a complete list of features and bug fixes included in this release, please refer to the release notes.
Feel free to join us and shape the future releases on our forums, our mailing lists or our #infinispan IRC channel.
Cheers,
Galder
Tags: beta release near caching configuration
Friday, 09 January 2015
Infinispan 7.1.0.Beta1
Dear Infinispan community,
We’re proud to announce the first Beta release of Infinispan 7.1.0.
Infinispan brings the following major improvements:
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Near-Cache support for Remote HotRod caches
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Annotation-based generation of ProtoBuf serializers which removes the need to write the schema files by hand and greatly improves usability of Remote Queries
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Cluster Listener Event Batching, which coalesces events for better performance
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Cluster- and node-wide aggregated statistics
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Vast improvements to the indexing performance
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Support for domain mode and the security vault in the server
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Further improvements to the Partition Handling with many stability fixes and the removal of the Unavailable mode: a cluster can now be either Available or Degraded.
Of course there’s also the usual slew of bug fixes, performance and memory usage improvements and documentation cleanups.
Feel free to join us and shape the future releases on our forums, our mailing lists or our #infinispan IRC channel.
For a complete list of features and bug fixes included in this release please refer to the release notes. Visit our downloads section to find the latest release.
Thanks to everyone for their involvement and contribution!
Tags: release near caching domain mode performance Protobuf indexing annotations
