All Things WebSphere

Customers often have questions around initialization, latency and the possiblity of race conditions when putting data in a Dynacache DistributedMap.  I have tried to collect all these questions and answers here in one place ...

Q Why is my cache instance data not replicating across cluster members ?
A  In order for a cache instance to be replicated  the cache instance has to be associated with a replication domain.  This association (Cache Instance -- Replication domain ) occurs through the cache instance configuration when the cache-instance is defined through 1. a properties file, 2. admin console or 3. programmatically. All the application servers in the cluster need to be added to the replication domain. Please note that replication ONLY occurs after the cache instances have bootstrapped with one another via the Data Replication Service (DRS). This initial bootstrap of cache instances takes some time and leads to situations where Objects placed in DistributedMap are not replicated. Bootstrap only occurs when a cache instance is created. A cache instance is ONLY created when it is first accessed * i..e. on demand. It is best practice to access the cache instance to trigger bootstrap as early as possible in the application life cycle . See next queston's answer for details.

Q What is the best practice in initializing the Dynacache DistributedMap cache instance for replication in a cluster environment ?
A It is best to create and access the Dmap in a ServletContextListener. The ServetContext is created by the container when the web application is deployed and after that only the context is available to each servlet in the web application. There is ONE servletContext for the entire web application.ServletContextListener is a interface which contains two methods:
--  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) ... do the context.lookup("cache/myDmapCache");  here
--  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) ... null out the map here
Doing this very early in the application lifecycle helps boostrap all the cache instances quickly.

Another thing you can do, is hook up a com.ibm.websphere.cache.ChangeListener to the DistributedMap intf.  to listen on the CRUD operations in the cache.   void cacheEntryChanged(ChangeEvent e) This method is invoked when there is a change to a cache entry. With respect to logging, you can turn on trace for com.ibm.ws.cache.drs.DRSMessageListener and watch for "updateEntryProp" trace string.

* In WAS7 Dynacache has a JVM generic customer property called "com.ibm.ws.cache.CacheConfig.createCacheAtServerStartup" which when set to "true" will create cache instances automatically at server startup instead of the default on-demand behavior.