[hibernate-dev] "rebranding" the Hibernate Search "ram" directory

[Gustavo Fernandes]

-1 to demote it to "testing"

Let me show the other side of the coin :)

RAMDirectory has its uses, as long as one understands its limitations. It
is convenient for small non-persistent indexes, and last time I measured,
it was faster to load than the FS directory.

So it could be used in production (and I believe some people do), and
renaming it to "testing" would feel a bit awkward. One example of
production use of the RAMDirectory is the ES Percolator [1]

We can always throw config errors or log WARN if someone is using "ram"
with clustered caches on Infinispan, but if rebranding is really needed,
I'd vote for something like "local-ram" or "local-heap".

Thanks,
Gustavo

[1]
https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/modules/percolator/src/main/java/org/elasticsearch/percolator/PercolateQueryBuilder.java



On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Sanne Grinovero <sanne at hibernate.org>
wrote:

> -1 for "ephemeral" and "volatile", they are pretty much synonyms of
> "ram" with all the same possible confusions, even to the point of
> looking like being the recommended choice for "ephemeral class"
> machines on openstack.
>
> "unreliable": it's not unrelaiable as it's actually very reliable and
> to be recommended for testing, e.g. if you have an issue with our
> other directories I'd love to know if you can reproduce it with this
> one.
>
> I'll go with "testing". I want to be able to recommend it for testing,
> and make it clear it's only meant for that.
>
>
> On 18 May 2017 at 20:22, Gunnar Morling <gunnar.morling at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > I'd argue you can keep the name, if it's in the test JAR. If people
> > still use it in their production code, well...
> >
> > Otherwise, how about "ephemeral"?
> >
> > 2017-05-18 19:05 GMT+02:00 Sanne Grinovero <sanne at hibernate.org>:
> >> On 18 May 2017 at 17:31, Gunnar Morling <gunnar.morling at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> Can't you just move it to the test JAR if it's for testing only?
> >>
> >> Interesting idea, we can try that as well.
> >>
> >> I'd still want to set the name straight though. Let's agree on a name
> first.
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Am 18.05.2017 6:29 nachm. schrieb "Sanne Grinovero" <
> sanne at hibernate.org>:
> >>>
> >>> Right technically it's not a unit test. But I'd like to focus on the
> >>> testing aspect, as "local-ram" might still convey concepts as "fast",
> >>> maybe even expect it to engage Infinispan's off-heap capabilities, or
> >>> just being an option to consider for other reasons.
> >>>
> >>> "testing" ?
> >>>
> >>> On 18 May 2017 at 17:20, Adrian Nistor <anistor at redhat.com> wrote:
> >>>> I agree, but probably "unit-testing" is not such a good name either.
> >>>> Technically, that's a functional test.
> >>>> I think I like "local-ram" better, implying that it is not
> >>>> shared/distributed and it is also volatile.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On 05/18/2017 06:07 PM, Sanne Grinovero wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> As anyone who's bothered to read the manual knows, the "ram"
> directory
> >>>>> should really only be used for unit tests. The other implementations,
> >>>>> while typically disk based, are also faster (memory mapped files) and
> >>>>> more efficient (better locking design) so there's really no reason to
> >>>>> use it, not even performance except for trivial, small, non important
> >>>>> data sets.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> For example the Elasticsearch team is making sure of this by having
> >>>>> totally removed the option of using the RAMDirectory - something I
> >>>>> actually don't appreciate as our unit tests could benefit from it,
> >>>>> having slow storage on our test environments.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Tristan is reporting that the "ram" terminology is confusing people,
> >>>>> not least in the Infinispan community as "RAM" might be ambiguous
> >>>>> since everything is in memory, and people get surprised it's not
> >>>>> replicated in the "in memory cluster".
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I wouldn't want to go to the extremes of the Elasticsearch team as I
> >>>>> believe having this option is very useful, especially for testing.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Should we rename (rebrand) its short name "ram" into "unit-testing" ?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I suspect that would make people think a bit more before pushing it
> >>>>> into production...
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Thanks,
> >>>>> Sanne
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
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> >>>
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