Write behind cache, DB down, when should the system stop taking new data in

Question

Hello:
We are trying to use Coherence for our custom ESB, which is brokering payloads of various size between consumer and provider applications.
Before Coherence, stopping our DB meant organization-wide outage for critically important business services.
Since we have at least 40G of RAM in production environment, we believe that our app
can use Coherence write-behind option for tolerating at least several hours worth of DB outage.
We are currently using a near cache backed by distributed cache in write-behind mode.
9 business service JVMs (storage enabled=false) use 30 storage enabled JVMs.
IMPORTANT: We need to create an automated alerting facility determining when
amount of unsaved data reaches critical level since DB goes down. This alert should help us decide when our application stops accepting inbound traffic.
It is hard to use QueueSize parameter for that because our payload memory footprint can vary from 1KB to 3MB.
We do not expire any entries in order to enable support queries against the cache during DB outage.
Our experiments with trying various flavors of overflow-scheme resulted in OutOfMemoryError, therefore
we decided to implement RAM-only cache as a first step.
<near-scheme>
<scheme-name>message_payload_scheme</scheme-name>
<front-scheme>
<local-scheme>
<scheme-ref>limited_entities_front_scheme</scheme-ref>
<high-units>100</high-units>
</local-scheme>
</front-scheme>
<back-scheme>
<distributed-scheme>
<backing-map-scheme>
<read-write-backing-map-scheme>
<internal-cache-scheme>
<local-scheme>
<scheme-ref>limited_bytes_scheme</scheme-ref>
<high-units>199229440</high-units>
</local-scheme>
</internal-cache-scheme>
<cachestore-scheme>
<class-scheme>
<class-name>com.comp.MessagePayloadStore</class-name>
</class-scheme>
</cachestore-scheme>
<read-only>false</read-only>
<write-delay-seconds>3</write-delay-seconds>
<write-requeue-threshold>2147483646</write-requeue-threshold>
</read-write-backing-map-scheme>
</backing-map-scheme>
<autostart>true</autostart>
</distributed-scheme>
</back-scheme>
</near-scheme>
<local-scheme>
<scheme-name>limited_entities_front_scheme</scheme-name>
<eviction-policy>LRU</eviction-policy>
<unit-calculator>FIXED</unit-calculator>
</local-scheme>
<local-scheme>
<scheme-name>limited_bytes_scheme</scheme-name>
<eviction-policy>HYBRID</eviction-policy>
<unit-calculator>BINARY</unit-calculator>
</local-scheme>

Answer 1

Good info ... I feel like I need to restate my original question along with a couple of new questions caused by the discussion above.
Q1. Does Coherence evict 'dirty', or 'queued', or 'unsaved' objects for cache configuration provided above?
The answer should be 'NO', otherwise Coherence is unsafe to use as a system of record,
it should not just drop unsaved information on the floor.
Q2. What happens to the front tier of the near+partitioned write behind cache described above when amount of unsaved data exceeds max cache capacity defined via high-units?
I would expect that map.put starts throwing exceptions: cache storage is full, so it should not accept more data
Q3. How can I determine a moment when amount of dirty data in bytes(!), not in objects, hits 85% of
max allowed cache capasity configured in bytes (using high-units param and BINARY calculator).
'DirtyUnits' counter can probably be built with some lower-level Coherence API. Can we use
this API?
Please, understand, that we purchased Coherence for reliability, for making our
system independent from short DB outages, for keeping our business services up
and running when DBA need some time for admin operations like rebuilding an index.
Performance benefits are secondary and are not as obvious for our system which
uses primary keys only and has a well-tuned co-located Oracle back-end.
We simply cannot put Coherence to production unless we prove that Coherence
can reliably hold the data and give us information about approaching crisis
(the cache full of unsaved data).
If possible, forward this message to Cameron Purdy,
who was presenting Coherence to our team several moths ago.
Thanks,
Vasili Smaliak
Applications Architect, Enterprise App Integration
GMAC ResCap
[email protected]