This document is intended to provide various answers to questions regarding the configuration of a local cache. The document is presented in a question / answer format.
Configuration of local caches involves editing the cache
configuration file, named cache.ccf
. The
classpath should include the directory where this file is
located or the file should be placed at the root of the
classpath, since it is discovered automatically.
The cache.ccf
file contains default configuration
information for cache regions and specific configuration
information for regions that you predefine. Regions not using
default behaviors should generally be configured via the
cache.ccf
file. If you can put configuration
information in a class, you can edit a props file just as
easily. This makes modification of the regional setting more
efficient and allows for startup error checking.
There are three main sections of the cache.ccf
file:
You can establish default values that any non-preconfigured
region will inherit. The non-predefined region will be
created when you call
CacheAccess.getAccess("cacheName")
. The default
setting look like this:
# DEFAULT CACHE REGION # sets the default aux value for any non configured caches jcs.default=DC,RFailover jcs.default.cacheattributes= org.apache.jcs.engine.CompositeCacheAttributes jcs.default.cacheattributes.MaxObjects=1000
The most important line is
jcs.default=DC,Rfailover
. This tells the cache
what auxiliary caches should be used. Auxiliary caches are
configured in the third section of the cache.ccf
and are referenced in a comma separated list. You can add as
many auxiliary caches as you want, but the behavior of remote
and lateral auxiliaries may conflict. This allows you to
define different configurations for auxiliary caches and to
use these different configurations for different regions.
Defining a region involves specifying which auxiliary caches it will use and how many objects it will store in memory. A typical region definition looks like:
jcs.region.testCache=DC,RFailover jcs.region.testCache.cacheattributes= org.apache.jcs.engine.CompositeCacheAttributes jcs.region.testCache.cacheattributes.MaxObjects=1000
The region name is testCache
. It will have a
1000 item memory limit and will use the DC and RFailover
auxiliary caches. If a typical element for this region was
very large, you might want to lower the number of items stored
in memory. The size of the memory storage is dependent on the
priority of the cache, the size of its elements, and the
amount of RAM on the machine.
Each auxiliary cache is created through a factory that passes an attribute object to the constructor. The attributes are set via reflection and should be fairly simple to understand. Each auxiliary cache will be fully documented. Plugging in your own auxiliary cache become a simple matter given the reflexive manner of initialization.
The most important settings for common usage are the disk path and the remote cache location. It is recommended that only disk and remote auxiliaries be used. The lateral caches are functional but not as efficient.
The default configuration code above specifies that non-preconfigured caches use the auxiliary cache by the name DC. This cache is defined in the third section of the file:
jcs.auxiliary.DC= org.apache.jcs.auxiliary.disk.DiskCacheFactory jcs.auxiliary.DC.attributes= org.apache.jcs.auxiliary.disk.DiskCacheAttributes jcs.auxiliary.DC.attributes.DiskPath=c:/dev/cache/raf
The only thing that needs to be set here is the
DiskPath
value. Change it to wherever you want
the cache to persist unused items.
The default region is also set to use an auxiliary called
RFailover
. This is a remote cache that is
designed to failover to other remote servers in a cluster:
jcs.auxiliary.RFailover= org.apache.jcs.auxiliary.remote.RemoteCacheFactory jcs.auxiliary.RFailover.attributes= org.apache.jcs.auxiliary.remote.RemoteCacheAttributes jcs.auxiliary.RFailover.attributes.RemoteTypeName=LOCAL jcs.auxiliary.RFailover.attributes.FailoverServers= localhost:1102,localhost:1101
If you don't have more than one remote server running, just
specify it by itself in the FailoverServers
attribute.