How to implement ConcurrentHashMap with features similar in LinkedHashMap?

Question

I have used LinkedHashMap with accessOrder true along with allowing a maximum of 500 entries at any time as the LRU cache for data. But due to scalability issues I want to move on to some thread-safe alternative. ConcurrentHashMap seems good in that regard, but lacks the features of accessOrder and removeEldestEntry(Map.Entry e) found in LinkedHashMap. Can anyone point to some link or help me to ease the implementation.

Answer 1

I did something similar recently with ConcurrentHashMap<String,CacheEntry>, where CacheEntry wraps the actual item and adds cache eviction statistics: expiration time, insertion time (for FIFO/LIFO eviction), last used time (for LRU/MRU eviction), number of hits (for LFU/MFU eviction), etc. The actual eviction is synchronized and creates an ArrayList<CacheEntry> and does a Collections.sort() on it using the appropriate Comparator for the eviction strategy. Since this is expensive, each eviction then lops off the bottom 5% of the CacheEntries. I'm sure performance tuning would help though.

In your case, since you're doing FIFO, you could keep a separate ConcurrentLinkedQueue. When you add an object to the ConcurrentHashMap, do a ConcurrentLinkedQueue.add() of that object. When you want to evict an entry, do a ConcurrentLinkedQueue.poll() to remove the oldest object, then remove it from the ConcurrentHashMap as well.

Update: Other possibilities in this area include a Java Collections synchronization wrapper and the Java 1.6 ConcurrentSkipListMap.

Answer 2

Have you tried using one of the many caching solutions like ehcache? You could try using LinkedHashMap with a ReadWriteLock. This would give you concurrent read access.