System and method for heterogeneous caching

Abstract

The caching of heterogeneous bean sets has been improved from requiring each bean to have its own cache instance to caching the beans in a single cache. The beans can be identified by generating a unique identifier that is a combination of the bean's primary key and a self-reference identifier of the bean manager associated with that bean. The average size of a bean set associated with a bean manager can be specified such that the cache allocates memory for that set based on the average size. A callback interface can also be used to shift knowledge of a bean life cycle back to the bean manager. This description is not intended to be a complete description of, or limit the scope of, the invention. Other features, aspects, and objects of the invention can be obtained from a review of the specification, the figures, and the claims.

Description

CLAIM OF PRIORITY [0001] This Application is a Continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 340,067 entitled “System and Method for Heterogeneous Caching” filed Jan. 10, 2003 [Attorney Docket No. BEAS-01199US1], which claims priority of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 349,577 entitled “System and Method for Heterogeneous Caching” filed Jan. 18, 2002 [Attorney Docket No. BEAS-01199US0].COPYRIGHT NOTICE [0002] A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED PATENT DOCUMENTS [0003] The following co-pending U.S. patent documents are assigned to BEA Systems, Inc., the assignee of the present application, and these documents are hereby in...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

This approach reduces memory waste by allowing multiple entity beans to share a cache, optimizing memory usage and enabling efficient management of different bean sizes and life cycles, while maintaining unique bean identities and supporting heterogeneous data sets.

Problems solved by technology

Utilizing separate caches can lead to problems with memory fragmentation.

Further, users can set limits on the size of these individual caches such that the system may be unable to use all available memory.

For example, one of the entity beans might be very busy and require a lot of memory, while other beans sit idle.

If the caches are configured to accommodate the busiest bean, the unused beans will have large cache allocations that will not be utilized, thereby wasting memory.

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