JBoss.orgCommunity Documentation
2.1. | Using JBoss Cache 2 or 3 on JBoss AS 4.x |
JBoss AS 4.x ships with JBoss Cache 1.4.x. To make use of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes in newer releases, you can follow some of the steps outlined onthis wiki page. | |
2.2. | Can I run multiple JBoss Cache instances on the same VM? |
Yes. There are some scenarios where you may want to run multiple instances of JBoss Cache. For example, you want to run multiple local cache instances with each instance having its own configuration (e.g., different cache policy). In this case, you will need multiple xml configuration files. | |
2.3. | Can JBoss Cache run as a second level cache inside Hibernate? |
Yes. Since Hibernate 3.0 release, you can configure it to use JBoss Cache as a second level cache. For details, see Hibernate documentation, and also see this wiki page. JBoss Cache 3.x with MVCC in particular works very well as a Hibernate second level cache. | |
2.4. | What about using POJO Cache as a Hibernate cache? |
It is not necessary to use POJO Cache for second level cache inside Hibernate because Hibernate manages fine-grained fields in Java objects. Using POJO Cache won't provide any advantage, and will be an unnecessary performance drawback. | |
2.5. | How can I configure JBoss Cache? |
You can configure the JBoss Cache through a configuration xml
file or programmatically using a
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2.6. | Can I use a schema or DTD to validate my JBoss Cache configuration file? |
As of JBoss Cache 3.x, yes. An XSD schema is provided in your jbosscache-core.jar file, and is also available online, on http://www.jboss.org/jbosscache/jbosscache-config-3.0.xsd. You can configure your IDE, text editor or XML authoring tool to use this schema to validate your file. | |
2.7. | What is the difference between the different cache modes? |
JBossCache has five different cache modes, i.e.,
Note that
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2.8. | How does JBoss Cache's replication mechanism work? |
JBoss Cache leverages JGroups for network communications. A JGroups configuration section is present in your JBoss Cache configuration.
A user
can configure the cluster of JBoss Cache instances by sharing the
same cluster name (
Note that once all instances join the same replication group, every replication change is propagated to all participating members. There is no mechanism for sub-partitioning where some replication can be done within only a subset of members, unless you use the Buddy Replication features. See the Users' Guide for more details on this. | |
2.9. | I run a 2 node cluster. If the network dies, do the caches continue to run? |
Yes, both will continue to run, but depending on your replication mode, all transactions or
operations may not complete. If
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2.10. | Can I plug in library X instead of JGroups to handle remote calls and group communications? |
At this stage the answer is no. We do have an abstraction layer between the communication suite and JBoss Cache in the pipelines, and this may appear as a feature at some stage in the future. | |
2.11. | Does the cache need to replicate to every other instance in the cluster? Isn't this slow if the cluster is large? |
Replication need not occur to every node in the cluster. This feature - called Buddy Replication - allows each node to pick one or more 'buddies' in the cluster and only replicate to its buddies. This allows a cluster to scale very easily with no extra impact on memory or network traffic with each node added. See the Users' Guide for more information on Buddy Replication, and how it can be used to achieve very high scalability. | |
2.12. | I'm using Buddy Replication. Do I need to have some form of session affinity? |
Session affinity relates to returning to the same cache instance for the same data being used. While this is strictly not a requirement for Buddy Replication, it is greatly recommended to minimize moving state around a cluster. | |
2.13. | If I have the need for different configuration properties (e.g.,
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Yes. All the above mentioned properties are per cache
instance. Therefore you will need separate
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2.14. | Isn't this expensive from a networking standpoint, i.e., needing to create sockets for each
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Yes, it can be. For such cases it is recommended that you configure your cache using the JGroups Multiplexer, which allows several caches to share a single JGroups channel. Please see the Users' Guide for details on how to configure the JGroups Multiplexer. A faster and more efficient approach is to use a shared transport in JGroups. Please see the JGroups documentation for more details on how to do this. | |
2.15. | Does the
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Yes. They are both JGroups group names. Besides the notion of a channel in JGroups, it also can partition the channel into different group names. | |
2.16. | When using multiple JGroups based components [cluster-service.xml, cache (multiple instances)], what is the correct/valid way to configure those components to make sure my multicast addresses don't conflict? |
There are two parameters to consider: multicast address (plus port) and the group name. At minimum, you will have to run components using a different group name. But whether to run them on the same channel depends upon whether the communication performance is critical for you or not. If it is, then it'd be best to run them on different channels. | |
2.17. | Does JBoss Cache support cache persistence storage? |
Yes. JBoss Cache has a cache loader interface that supports cache persistence. See below for more FAQs on cache loaders. | |
2.18. | Does JBoss Cache support cache passivation/ overflow to a data store? |
Yes. JBoss Cache uses the cache loader to support cache passivation/ overflow. See documentation on how to configure and use this feature. | |
2.19. | Is JBoss Cache thread safe? |
Yes, it is thread safe. | |
2.20. | Does JBoss Cache support XA (2PC) transactions now? |
No, although it is also on our to do list. Our internal implementation does use a procedure similar to 2PC to coordinate a transactions among different instances, but JBoss Cache is not an XA resource. | |
2.21. | Which transaction managers are supported by JBoss Cache? |
JBoss Cache supports any TransactionManager that is JTA compliant such asJBoss Transactions.
While JBoss Cache does ships with a
dummy transaction manager
( | |
2.22. | How do I set up the cache to be transactional? |
You either use the default transaction manager that ships with JBoss AS
or you have to implement the
The
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2.23. | How do I control the cache locking level? |
JBoss Cache lets you control the cache locking level through
the transaction isolation level. This is configured through the
attribute
As of JBoss Cache 3.x, when using the MVCC locking scheme, only
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2.24. | How does JBoss Cache lock data for concurrent access? |
In JBoss Cache 2.x, by default pessimistic locking is used to lock data nodes, based on the isolation level configured. We also offer optimistic locking to allow for greater concurrency at the cost of slight processing overhead and performance. See the documentation for a more detailed discussion on concurrency and locking in JBoss Cache. In JBoss Cache 3.x, optimistic and pessimistic locking are deprecated in favour of MVCC (multi-version concurrency control), which is far more efficient than either optimistic or pessimistic locking. For a detailed discussion on our MVCC implementation, see this blog entry andthis wiki page. | |
2.25. | How do I enable Optimistic Locking or MVCC in JBoss Cache? |
Please see the configuration section of the Users' Guide for details. | |
2.26. | Can I use the cache locking level even without a transaction context? |
Yes. JBoss Cache controls the individual node locking behavior
through the isolation level semantics. This means even if you don't
use a transaction, you can specify the lock level via isolation
level. You can think of the node locking behavior outside of a
transaction as if it is under transaction with
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2.27. |
Does JBoss Cache support
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Yes, but this is is only possible if you are running within a JTA transaction
and
are using either
To achieve
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2.28. | With replication (REPL_SYNC/REPL_ASYNC) or invalidation (INVALIDATION_SYNC/INVALIDATION_ASYNC), how often does the cache broadcast messages over the network? |
If the updates are under transaction, then the broadcasts happen only when the transaction is about to commit (actually during the prepare stage internally). That is, it will be a batch update. However, if the operations are not under transaction context, then each update will trigger replication. Note that this has performance implications if network latency is a problem. | |
2.29. | How can I do a mass removal? |
If you do a | |
2.30. | Can I monitor and manage the JBoss Cache? |
Yes, using a JMX console such as the one shipped with JBoss AS or Java 5's
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2.31. |
JBoss Cache uses a
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This is something we have seen with some MBean servers. By default, JBoss Cache uses
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2.32. | Can I disable JBoss Cache management attributes? |
Yes, you can. See the section on configuration in the JBoss Cache Users' Guide. | |
2.33. | What happened to jboss-serialization.jar? |
As of JBoss Cache 2.0.0, the dependency on JBoss Serialization has been dropped since most of the benefits of JBoss Serialization are available in updated Java 5 VMs. Since JBoss Cache 2.0.0 is baselined on Java 5, there was no need to provide these benefits separately. | |
2.34. | Does JBoss Cache support partitioning? |
Not right now. JBoss Cache does not support partitioning that a user can configure to have different set of data residing on different cache instances while still participating as a replication group. This is on the roadmap though, so do keep an eye on JBCACHE-60 if you are interested. | |
2.35. | Does JBoss Cache handle the concept of application classloading inside, say, a Java EE container? |
Application-specific classloading is used widely inside a Java EE container. For example, a web application may require a new classloader to scope a specific version of the user library. However, by default JBoss Cache is agnostic to the classloader. In general, this leads to two kinds of problems:
To solve the first kind of issue JBoss Cache uses a
To solve the second kind of issue, you can use the the
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2.36. | Does JBoss Cache currently support pre-event and post-event notification? |
Yes. A boolean is passed in to each notification callback identifying whether the callback is
before
or after the event. See the
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2.37. | How do I implement a custom listener to listen to cache events? |
See the Users' Guide on this subject. | |
2.38. | Can I use
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Yes, you can. Originally, cache Marshalling was designed as a workaround for those replicated caches that upon state transfer did not have access to the classloaders defining the objects in the cache. On each deployment, JBoss creates a new classloader per the top level deployment artifact, for example an EAR. You also have to bear in mind that a class in an application server is defined not only by the class name but also its classloader. So, assuming that the cache is not deployed as part of your deployment, you could deploy an application and put instances of classes belonging to this deployment inside the cache. If you did a redeployment and try to do a get operation of the data previously put, this would result on a ClassCastException. This is because even though the class names are the same, the class definitions are not. The current classloader is different to the one when the classes were originally put. By enabling marshalling, you can control the lifecycle of the data in the cache and if on undeployment, you deactivate the region and unregister the classloader that you'd have registered on deployment, you'd evict the data in the cache locally. That means that in the next deployment, the data won't be in the cache, therefore avoiding the problem. Obviously, using marshalling to get around this problem is only recommended when you have some kind of persistence backing where the data survives, for example using CacheLoaders, or when JBoss Cache is used as a second level cache in a persistence framework. To implement this feature, please follow the instructions indicated in the example located
in the CacheMarshaller section of the Users' Guide. It's worth noting that instead of a
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