I am using embedded Infinispan 10.1.8 and I have a clustered cache in INVALIDATION_SYNC mode. The cache is backed by another data store which is rarely updated which is why it's in that mode.
When a server leaves the cluster, Infinispan logs a message like this:
[Context=<cache name>] ISPN000312: Lost data because of graceful leaver <address>
Whatever was in the cache on that server is lost from memory, but since it is an invalidation cache I don't see why this would be a warning.
Is the warning unnecessary, or am I misunderstanding something about how this caching works?
I think the warning in invalidation mode only makes sense when you use the mode in a way that does not make sense.
This cache mode only makes sense if you have another, permanent store for your data such as a database and are only using Infinispan as an optimization in a read-heavy system, to prevent hitting the database for every read.
Source: https://infinispan.org/docs/dev/titles/configuring/configuring.html#invalidation-configuring
When you have such a permanent store, you effectively just loose the information in what state the cache was regarding the "lost" but easily recoverable segment.
The warning is always logged when a cache segment is not backed by any node anymore:
https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/10.1.8.Final/core/src/main/java/org/infinispan/partitionhandling/impl/PreferAvailabilityStrategy.java#L54
https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/10.1.8.Final/core/src/main/java/org/infinispan/topology/ClusterTopologyManagerImpl.java#L785
When you use a replicated cache that is not backed by a permanent store, you really loose data. I can't think of a situation where the warning makes sense in invalidation mode. I think in this case the warning should be removed because it is irritating.
Related
I have an Apache Geode setup, connected with external Postgres datasource. I have a scenario where I define an expiration time for a key. Let's say after T time the key is going to expire. Is there a way so that the keys which are going to expire can make a call to an external datasource and update the value incase the value has been changed? I want a kind of automatic syncing for my keys which are there in Apache Geode. Is there any interface which i can implement and get the desired behavior?
I am not sure I fully understand your question. Are you saying that the values in the cache may possibly be more recent than what is currently stored in the database?
Whether you are using Look-Aside Caching, Inline Caching, or even Near Caching, Apache Geode combined with Spring would take care of ensuring the cache and database are kept in sync, to some extent depending on the caching pattern.
With Look-Aside Caching, if used properly, the database (i.e. primary System of Record (SOR), e.g. Postgres in your case) should always be the most current. (Look-Aside) Caching is secondary.
With Synchronous Inline Caching (using a CacheLoader/CacheWriter combination for Read/Write-Through) and in particular, with emphasis on CacheWriter, during updates (e.g. Region.put(key, value) cache operations), the DB is written to first, before the entry is stored (or overwritten) in the cache. If the DB write fails, then the cache entry is not written or updated. This is true each time a value for a key is updated. If the key has not be updated recently, then the database should reflect the most recent value. Once again, the database should always be the most current.
With Asynchronous Inline Caching (using AEQ + Listener, for Write-Behind), the updates for a cache entry are queued and asynchronously written to the DB. If an entry is updated, then Geode can guarantee that the value is eventually written to the underlying DB regardless of whether the key expires at some time later or not. You can persist and replay the queue in case of system failures, conflate events, and so on. In this case, the cache and DB are eventually consistent and it is assumed that you are aware of this, and this is acceptable for your application use case.
Of course, all of these caching patterns and scenarios I described above assume nothing else is modifying the SOR/database. If another external application or process is also modifying the database, separate from your Geode-based application, then it would be possible for Geode to become out-of-sync with the database and you would need to take steps to identify this situation. This is rather an issue for reads, not writes. Of course, you further need to make sure that stale cache entries does not subsequently overwrite the database on an update. This is easy enough to handle with optimistic locking. You could even trigger a cache entry remove on an DB update failure to have the cache refreshed on read.
Anyway, all of this is to say, if you applied 1 of the caching patterns above correctly, the value in the cache should already be reflected in the DB (or will be in the Async, Write-Behind Caching UC), even if the entry eventually expires.
Make sense?
Could you please answer these 2 questions and correct me if wrong.
I assume Both Redis Database and Redis Cache are stored in Memory and not in Disk. Am I correct?
If Yes, What are the major difference between both. I am assuming both are stored in memory and it should not make much difference between them both. I mean the speed should be the same as they are in memory only. Do we still need Cache again?
Could you please tell me what are the differences and advantages between the both.
Second Question: Can the server restart remove all data in the Redis database? Cache must be deleted for sure I believe.
Thanks
Not sure what do you mean?
Redis is a product first of all - its an in-memory data structures store.
Depending on its configurations it can be targeted to different use cases:
Database
Cache
Even message broker
If you're coming from the cloud world, cloud providers can call this "Cache" and this means that they offer a redis that is pre-configured to be used as a cache (remove the oldest records when the memory becomes next to be fully utilized, etc).
But after you'll you will work with some kind of redis client that will interact with remote redis server.
1.While priming a ignite cache, what is the performance when its done from persistent store? What is the preferred method of priming a cache on warm start ? Is there any way it can be done by taking a file dump and then priming the cache ,which would be faster then doing it from Persistent Store?
2.How are the indexes built if a ignite server goes down ?
3.If its rebuilt then is there any way by which we can avoid this overhead? Off heap storage would be comparitively slower.
There are two ways to load large amounts of data from the persistence store: using IgniteDataStreamer and through CacheStore implementation. Please refer to [1] for details. CacheStore can be more performant, especially with partition-aware approach, but IgniteDataStreamer can be also used to continuously stream the data while executing other cache operations concurrently. Dumping to a file is not supported by Ignite, but there is an enterprise-level feature provided by GridGain that does this [2].
Indexes are not rebuilt in this case. If you have backups, indexes are maintained for them as well as for primary entries, so if node fails, nothing is lost.
As I mentioned in 2, indexes are not rebuilt in case of node failure.
[1] https://apacheignite.readme.io/docs/data-loading
[2] https://gridgain.readme.io/docs/local-recoverable-store
According to the docs for infinispan: http://docs.jboss.org/infinispan/5.0/apidocs/ the evict() API does not remove the entry from any other cache stores in the cluster, on the cache store it was invoked on.
If using "replication" mode, where the data is replicated across the caches, surely it has to be consisted and using the evict() API will make it inconsistent.
How then is the inconsistency resolved?
Thanks
Evict removes the entry only from the memory on the node where you call it. It does not make the cache inconsistent, because if you call cache.get() and the entry is not found in memory, it is loaded from cache store.
As the documentation states, the purpose is to inform cache that it won't use the entry for some time and the node can free some memory.
Background to question: I'm looking to implement a caching system for my website. Currently we're exploring memcache as a means of doing this. However, I am looking to see if something similar exists for SQL Server. I understand that MySQL has query cache which although is not distributed works as a sort of 'stop gap' measure. Is MySQL query cache equivalent to the buffer cache in SQL Server?
So here are my questions:
Is there a way to know is currently stored in the buffer cache?
Follow up to this, is there a way to force certain tables or result sets into the cache
How much control do I have over what goes on in the buffer and procedure cache? I understand there used to be a DBCC PINTABLE command but that has since been discontinued.
Slightly off topic: Should the caching even exists on the database layer? Or it is more prudent to manage caches using Velocity/Memcache? Is so, why? It seems like cache invalidation is something of a pain when handling many objects with overlapping triggers.
Thanks!
SQL Server implements a buffer pool same way every database product under the sun does (more or less) since System R showed the way. The gory details are explain in Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. I addition it has a caching framework used by the procedure cache, permission token cache and many many other caching classes. This framework is best described in Clock Hands - what are they for.
But this is not the kind of caching applications are usually interested in. The internal database cache is perfect for scale-up scenarios where a more powerfull back end database is able to respond faster to more queries by using these caches, but the modern application stack tends to scale out the web servers and the real problem is caching the results of query interogations in a cache used by the web farm. Ideally, this cache should be shared and distributed. Memcached and Velocity are examples of such application caching infrastructure. Memcache has a long history by now, its uses and shortcommings are understood, there is significant know-how around how to use it, deploy it, manage it and monitor it.
The biggest problem with caching in the application layer, and specially with distributed caching, is cache invalidation. How to detect the changes that occur in the back end data and mark cached entries invalid so that new requests don't use stale data.
The simplest (for some definition of simple...) alternative is proactive invalidation from the application. The code knows when it changes an entity in the database, and after the change occurs it takes the extra step to mark the cached entries invalid. This has several short commings:
Is difficult to know exactly which cached entries are to be invalidated. Dependencies can be quite complex, things are always more that just a simple table/entry, there are aggregate queries, joins, partitioned data etc etc.
Code discipline is required to ensure all paths that modify data also invalidate the cache.
Changes to the data that occur outside the application scope are not detected. In practice, there are always changes that occur outside the application scope: other applications using the same data, import/export and ETL jobs, manual intervention etc etc.
A more complicated alternative is a cache that is notified by the database itself when changes occur. Not many technologies are around to support this though, it cannot work without an active support from the database. SQL Server has Query Notifications for such scenarios, you can read more about it at The Mysterious Notification. Implementing QN based caching in a standalone application is fairly complicated (and often done badly) but it works fine when implemented correctly. Doing so in a shared scaled out cache like Memcached is quite a feats of strength, but is doable.
Nai,
Answers to your questions follow:
From Wiki - Always correct... ? :-). For a more Microsoft answer, here is their description on Buffer Cache.
Buffer management
SQL Server buffers pages in RAM to
minimize disc I/O. Any 8 KB page can
be buffered in-memory, and the set of
all pages currently buffered is called
the buffer cache. The amount of memory
available to SQL Server decides how
many pages will be cached in memory.
The buffer cache is managed by the
Buffer Manager. Either reading from or
writing to any page copies it to the
buffer cache. Subsequent reads or
writes are redirected to the in-memory
copy, rather than the on-disc version.
The page is updated on the disc by the
Buffer Manager only if the in-memory
cache has not been referenced for some
time. While writing pages back to
disc, asynchronous I/O is used whereby
the I/O operation is done in a
background thread so that other
operations do not have to wait for the
I/O operation to complete. Each page
is written along with its checksum
when it is written. When reading the
page back, its checksum is computed
again and matched with the stored
version to ensure the page has not
been damaged or tampered with in the
meantime.
For this answer, please refer to the above answer:
Either reading from or writing to any page copies it to the buffer cache. Subsequent reads or writes are redirected to the in-memory copy, rather than the on-disc version.
You can query the bpool_commit_target and bpool_committed columns in the sys.dm_os_sys_info catalog view to return the number of pages reserved as the memory target and the number of pages currently committed in the buffer cache, respectively.
I feel like Microsoft has had time to figure out caching for their product and should be trusted.
I hope this information was helpful,
Thanks!
Caching can take many different meaning for an ASP.Net application spread from the browser all the way to your hardware with the IIS, Application, Database thrown in the middle.
The caching you are talking about is Database level caching, this is mostly transparent to your application. This level of caching will include buffer pools, statement caches etc. Make sure your DB server has plenty of RAM. In theory a DB server should be able to load the entire DB store in memory. There is not much you can do at this level unless you pre-fetch some anticipated data when you start the application and ensure that it is in DB cache.
On the other hand is in-memory distributed caching system. Apart from memcache and velocity, you can look at some commercial solutions like NCache or Oracle Coherence. I have no experience in either of them to recommend. This level of caching promises scalability at a cheaper cost. It is expensive to scale the DB tier compared to this. You may have to consider aspects like network bandwidth though. This type of caching, specially with invalidation and expiry can be complicated
You can cache at Web Service tier using output caching at IIS level (in IIS 7) and ASP.Net level.
At the application level you can use ASP.Net cache. This is the one that you can control most and gives you good benefits.
Then there is caching going on at client web proxy tier that can be controlled by cache-control HTTP header.
Finally you have browser level caching, view state and cookies for small data.
And don't forget that hardware like SAN caches at physical disk access level too.
In summary caching can occur at many levels and it for you to analyse and implement the best solution for your scenario. You have find out stability and volatility of your data, expected load etc. I believe caching at ASP.Net level (specially for objects) gives you most flexibility and control.
Your specific technical questions about SQL Server's buffer cache are going down the wrong path when it comes to "implement a caching system for my website".
Sure, SQL Server is going to cache data so it can improve its performance (and it does so rather well), but the point of implementing a caching layer on your web front-ends is to avoid from having to talk to the database at all - because there is still overhead and resource contention even when your query is fulfilled entirely from SQL Server's cache.
You want to be looking into is: memcached, Velocity, ASP.NET Cache, P&P Caching Application Block, etc.