[infinispan-dev] What should be the default transaction mode: transactional or non-transactional?

[Mircea Markus]

Hi,

ATM the default cache transaction model in 5.1 is transactional. The main reason transactional cache was chosen by default was backward compatibility: existing code that access the cache in a mixed way (i.e. both transactional and non transactional) would fail if the default mode is non transactional. By fail I don't mean a runtime exception being thrown, but the the operations in transaction's scope being executed individually and the transaction ignored.

As Galder highlighted, the problem with being transactional by default is that you pay a penalti if you take Infinispan and run out of the box as a simple local cache for example. In theory, in only makes sense to enable transactional behaivour if you want transactions. [1]
 
Shall we switch to non-tx caches by default? Or implement ISPN-61 in 5.1, measure performance and if perf is ok stick with transactional cache? [2] Opinions?

Cheers,
Mircea


[1]
a). The performance for a get should be the same for a tx and non tx cache. 
b)  Put's performance is better now: 1RPC for non-tx and 2 RPC for tx. However this will change once https://issues.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-61. With ISPN-61 implemented, I expect the performance of both tx and non-tx caches to be roughly the same.

[2] Implementing first optimisation described in ISPN-61 is rather trivial right now.
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