[infinispan-dev] InternalCacheValue, Marshalling and Cache Stores

As pointed out by genman, the use of InternalCacheEntries (ICEs) in certain cache stores can lead to unnecessary marshalling of a key twice, impacting both time to marshall and space consumed by the resulting byte stream. Cache stores specifically affected are the JdbcStringBasedCacheStore, BdbjeCacheStore, JdbmCacheStore and ClusteredCacheLoader. The ClusteredGetCommand - used by both the ClusteredCacheLoader as well as the DistributionInterceptor for remote lookups - is also affected. There is no point in a remote host marshalling the key in ICE as a part of the response stream, the caller already has the key as it was a part of the request. All the same, we cannot remove the key portion of ICE or exclude it from marshalling as it is needed for other purposes such as state transfer. Bucket-based cache stores too require the key to be stored with the entry. So to work around this, I have provided an additional interface: InternalCacheValue (ICV). This is a representation of a value (+ any information pertaining to expiry). So essentially all the stuff in an ICE minus the key. An ICV is obtained by invoking ICE.toInternalCacheValue(). The cache stores mentioned above - and ClusteredGetCommand - should make sure they marshall ICVs rather than ICEs. When loading entries, an ICE can be created by using ICV.toInternalCacheEntry(Object key). Could the respective authors of the stores above please modify their code accordingly - I've just checked in the ICV changes in trunk. Cheers -- Manik Surtani manik(a)jboss.org Lead, Infinispan Lead, JBoss Cache http://www.infinispan.org http://www.jbosscache.org