Writer

CacheWriter is in early development and not yet fully integrated. This draft documents the expected usage.

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LoadingCache<Key, Graph> graphs = Caffeine.newBuilder()
  .writer(new CacheWriter<Key, Graph>() {
    @Override public void write(Key key, Graph graph) {
      // write to storage or secondary cache
    }
    @Override public void delete(Key key, Graph graph, RemovalCause cause) {
      // delete from storage or secondary cache
    })
  .build(key -> createExpensiveGraph(key));

CacheWriter allows the cache to act as a facade to the underlying resource and, when combined with a CacheLoader, all reads and writes can propagate through the cache. Writers expand the atomic operation on the cache to include synchronizing with an external resource. This means that the cache will block subsequent mutative operations for the entry until the writer completes. If the writer fails then the mapping is left unchanged and the exception propagates to the caller. While the write is in progress the previous value may be read from the cache. Note that the CacheWriter is notified if the entry is explicitly created, but not when the entry is loaded due to a cache miss.

In a write-through cache the operations are performed synchronously and the cache will only be updated if the writer completes successfully. This avoids race conditions where the resource and cache are updated as independent atomic operations.

In a write-back cache the operation to the external resource is performed asynchronously after the cache has been updated. This improves write throughput at the risk of data inconsistency, such as leaving invalid state in the cache if the write fails. This approach may be useful to delay writes until a specific time, limit the write rate, or batch write operations.

A layered cache loads from and writes to an external cache that is backed by the system of record. This allows having a small fast cache that falls back to slow large cache. Typical tiers are off-heap, file-based, and remote caches.

A victim cache is a layering variant where the evicted entries are written to the secondary cache. The delete(K, V, RemovalCause) allows for inspecting why the entry was removed and reacting accordingly.