Re: Memory Management using Tomcat

From: Joe Baldwin (jfbaldwi..arthlink.net)
Date: Thu Sep 17 2009 - 14:18:16 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Gentry: "Re: Memory Management using Tomcat"

    Michael,

    > With a paginated query, Cayenne fetches all of the PKs in
    > (500-5000), but then only fetches one page of data objects (say 10,
    > using the PKs it fetched previously) as you are looking at them,
    > which will be more efficient for large sets where you don't use all
    > of the data at one time.

    Yes this is a really good idea. I have been using it for the past few
    months now. However, I was also using caching (which your docs say
    interferes with BaseContext "weak reference" memory management).

    My initial plan was to cache the products that are simply being looked
    at by customers. However, I thought that might be a problem if as
    customers look different products the cache will simply grow until it
    runs out of memory. So I am not sure if this is a good idea anymore.
    Is this cache ever released after a period of time?

    Second, I am investigating a comment by the Webhost tech support, who
    said: "watch out for singletons". Well the only thing that might be a
    problem that I have done is to implement a Factory class, which is
    essentially a set of class methods that I have written to accomplish
    to most repeated fetches. Would these fetches using static methods (I
    use only local variables in these static methods) cause any problems
    with BaseContext memory managment?

    So, if these are not the problems then I guess all I can do is
    increase the Xms.

    Thanks,
    Joe

    > If you are fetching 500-5000 products at a time, I'd seriously
    > consider using pagination since it is unlikely they will look at
    > 500-5000 products at a time. On your SelectQuery object, do a
    > setPageSize(10) -- or some other reasonable number (how ever many
    > products you show on one page). This will reduce the memory
    > footprint. See:
    >
    > http://cayenne.apache.org/doc/paginated-queries.html
    >
    > With a paginated query, Cayenne fetches all of the PKs in (500-5000),
    > but then only fetches one page of data objects (say 10, using the PKs
    > it fetched previously) as you are looking at them, which will be more
    > efficient for large sets where you don't use all of the data at one
    > time.
    >
    > As for one context/application, this is not what the thread context
    > (which you are using) does. The Cayenne filter creates or restores a
    > session-based context that is kept around for that user for the life
    > of the session. For some applications this makes perfect sense. You
    > might want to keep their shopping cart objects around from
    > request-to-request, for example. For a catalog type application,
    > though, I personally would probably use a brand-new context in each
    > request for fetching catalog data, letting it go at the end of the
    > request. This will allow those contexts and data objects to be
    > garbage collected much sooner. When needing to copy something from
    > the temporary catalog context to the user's session context (because
    > Cayenne needs related objects in the same context), you need to use
    > localObject():
    >
    > http://cayenne.apache.org/doc/moving-objects-between-contexts.html
    >
    > I know that was long-winded, but I hope it gave you some ideas.
    >
    > Also, you said, "I do not want to do this if this is not your normal
    > procedure." There isn't really a normal procedure. Each application
    > has requirements that drive how you approach it. In one application I
    > kept 10,000+ records in an application-level object that was shared by
    > all sessions. These records were read-mostly and expensive to read in
    > (required several minutes due to the number of joins) and I cached
    > them and controlled access to them. This approach made sense -- for
    > that application.
    >
    > mrg
    >
    > PS. Add the paginated queries first and see how much that buys you.
    > That should be easy to do. Changing the way you are using the context
    > will be much more time consuming.



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