Ehcache, Redis and Gemfire which Cache for which Scenario?

Question

Grails provides three extended cache plugins:

1. Ehcache

2. Redis Cache

3. Gemfire Cache

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these caches and in which scenario should I use which cache?

Answer 1

Redis is a shared data structure, while ehCache is an in-memory storage of serialized data objects. Gemfire is similarly to ehCache, but they try to solve the data synchronization issues between multiple machines. So an in-memory data system used in the distributed environments.

So it depends. Is your software scaled to multiple machines then ehCache is not be the best option, since you will have to worry about cache invalidation on all machines (and to have the same version of data on every machine).

Do you need more than just caching? Will software written in multiple languages use your cache? Then use Redis. Redis is not just a cache, it can be viewed as a key value storage (database - like) where the data is stored on a machine in the RAM memory, but it can also be flushed to disk (to keep it persistent).

In Redis you can query data, you can create great counters, send batch transactions. check here for more info: http://redis.io/topics/introduction

Between all 3, I would personally pick redis (for large distributed software) and ehCache when I just need a simple, quick in memory cache. These 2 have great communities behind them and you will find answers to whatever issues you encounter.