Use cases for Cacheismo

Cacheimso is a scriptable in-memory lua object/key value cache, written in c and works on most posix compliant systems. It is based on a simple idea of exposing objects with methods instead of opaque values.

• Simplest use case would be to use cacheismo as a key value cache, just like memcached. It supports the tcp ascii memcached protocol. No need to specify or tune slab sizes. You would be surprised by improvement in your cache hit rate. This comes from using special memory management scheme to optimize memory usage.  Cacheismo Memory Management 
• Second use case for cacheismo is when you would like to store server side state which is frequently modified. Typically this is where you would use CAS operations in memcached.  Example could be counters, rate limiting, last N users, etc. If you use memcached for storing session objects, it would be essential to map users to specific machines so that session information is not corrupted because of concurrent modifications to session state. With cacheismo you could keep your session object in cacheismo server and let any app server to handle any user request.  Cacheismo allows creating server side objects in lua scripting language which can be atomically modified by use of get operations on special keys called virtual keys.  Cacheismo running on single core can at max do about 80K get operations per second and this includes running a minimal script on every get operation. Your mileage will depend upon complexity of the script and size of your objects.   Sliding Window Counter Quota With Cacheismo Cacheismo Lua API
• Cacheismo also supports talking to other cacheismo server from the scripting environment. This is based on two functions getFromServer and getInParallel.  These can be used to create synchronous  replication, proxy functionality to route requests to different servers and for in memory parallel computations.  Cacheismo Cluster Using Cacheismo Cluster For Real Time Analytics 
• Cacheismo also supports querying for existing keys through scripts. This can be used to create replica of an existing system if the current system needs to be shutdown for any reason. Finding Keys In Cacheismo
• Cacheismo supports server side consistent hashing. If you find it difficult to update all your app machines when new servers are added, you could use this feature to do seamless upgrades. This comes with a network cost. One hop to the first cacheismo server which finds the right node and second to the right node for the key. 

Finding Keys In Cacheismo

In the last post I talked about how to do map-reduce like stuff with cacheimso. It occurred to me that their is no method to get all the keys. The global hashmap object now supports new method getPrefixMatchingKeys which as the name implies returns keys which match a certain prefix. Typically objects are stored with following template objectType$objectKey. Thus an object created by file quota.lua with key myKey will be stored with key quota$myKey. To do something with all the quota objects:
   
local keys = getHashMap():getPrefixMatchingKeys("quota$")
for k,v in pairs(keys) do 
   print(v)
end

If you would like the quota object itself to support say getAllKeys method then ...add this to quota.lua in scripts directory.



function getAllKeys() 

    local keys = getHashMap():getPrefixMatchingKeys("quota$")
    local result = ""
    for k,v in pairs(keys) do 
       result..v.."\n"  
    end
end

Now a get request with key quota:getAllKeys would return a new line separated list of all active quota objects in the map.

This is good enough but probably not very interesting. I am planning to support indexes as first class objects to make it faster to reach interesting objects in quick time. These indexes will automatically remove objects which are deleted or forced to expire because of LRU caching. So if you need to find all the quota objects that are close to quota limit, create an index on quota used value.