New JBossCache release candidate

We at JBoss Cache are proud to announce a forth release candidate for Alegrias - JBoss Cache 2.1.0.CR4.

Please do download and try this release out - it has substantial stability improvements, lot of it based on community feedback. Your suggestions are important to us, please join the user forums if you already haven't done so, and provide us with as much feedback as you can. Also don't forget about our Month Of Bugs!

The download is available on the JBoss Cache downloads page, and the docs on the JBoss Cache docs page. The user forums are in the usual place.

Have fun!
Mircea

Reusable object streams

In the process of profiling JBoss Cache internals prior to releasing another CR, I noticed that a lot of time was spent in the construction of ObjectOutputStreams and ObjectInputStreams. Especially wasteful since these streams are created for a very short while, just to be able to marshall an RPC method call to a byte buffer, to pass in to JGroups to replicate, or to unmarshall
a method call from a byte buffer on the other end.

Given that these streams have such a short life span, and are very frequently created and thrown away, pooling them is an obvious conclusion to come to. The problem is, JDK object streams make it very difficult to reset or reuse.

To overcome this, I have created my own set of streams - ReusableObjectOutputStream and ReusableObjectInputStream - that adds the ability to re-initialise the backing byte buffer. Which suddenly makes pooling possible. I can see why the JDK object streams do not allow reuse, since they could be backed by network streams that cannot be altered or reset, but in my case, since they are always backed by byte arrays, this is possible.

As far as JBoss Cache is concerned, I've had to add a few more configuration elements, with which to configure pool size and optimal default byte buffer size.

The code for these streams currently live in the JBoss Cache source tree. If there is any such use for such streams outside of JBoss Cache, let me know and perhaps I can package it as an independent library.