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

[Sanne Grinovero]

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