One idea I had was to use soft references for object cache in key-value store. Currently we use an LRU hashmap, but the drawback of this is that it needs to be carefully sized based on heap size and the number of partitions. It is a little hard to know when to add memory to the object cache vs the block cache. Plus, since the size is based both on the objects in it, but also the overhead per object this is pretty impossible to calculate the worst case memory usage of N objects to make this work properly with a given heap size.
Another option would be to use soft references: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/ref/SoftReference.html Soft references will let you use all available heap space as a cache that gets gc'd only when strong These are usually frowned upon for caches due to the unpredictability of the discard--basically the garbage collector has some heuristic by which it chooses what to discard ( http://jeremymanson.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-hotspot-decides-to-clear_07.html) but it is based on a heuristic of how much actual free memory to maintain. This makes soft references a little dicey for latency sensitive services. But for Samza the caching is really about optimizing throughput not reducing the latency of a particular lookup. So using the rest of the free memory in the heap for caching is actually attractive. It is true that the garbage collector might occasionally destroy our cache but that is actually okay and possibly worth getting orders of magnitude extra cache space. This does seem like the kind of thing that would have odd corner cases. Anyone have practical experience with these who can tell me why this is a bad idea? -Jay
