Guava Cache

Google's Guava Cache is a lightweight, threadsafe Java cache that provides some nice features such as:

• eviction of least recently used entries when a maximum size is breached
• eviction of entries based on time since last access or last write
• notification of evicted entries
• performance statistics e.g. hit and miss counts

In order to create the Cache, you need to use a CacheBuilder. This allows you to specify the eviction policy and other features such as concurrency level, soft or weak values etc. You also need to specify a CacheLoader which will be invoked automatically by the cache if a key does not exist and is used to populate it.

The following code demonstrates how to create a cache:

// Create the cache. Only allow a max of 10 entries.
// Old entries will be evicted.
final Cache<String, String> cache = CacheBuilder.newBuilder()
    .maximumSize(10)
    .removalListener(new RemovalListener<String, String>() {
        @Override
        public void onRemoval(RemovalNotification<String, String> n) {
            System.out.println("REMOVED: " + n);
        }
    })
    .build(new CacheLoader<String, String>() {
        @Override
        public String load(String key) throws Exception {
            System.out.println("LOADING: " + key);
            return key + "-VALUE";
        }
    });

// Get values from the cache.
// If a key does not exist, it will be loaded.
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
  System.out.println(cache.get("Key" + i));
}
for (int i = 9; i >= 0; i--) {
  System.out.println(cache.get("Key" + i));
}

//Print out the hit counts.
System.out.println(cache.stats());

The output of this program is:

LOADING: Key0
LOADING: Key1
LOADING: Key2
LOADING: Key3
LOADING: Key4
LOADING: Key5
LOADING: Key6
REMOVED: Key0=Key0-VALUE
LOADING: Key7
REMOVED: Key3=Key3-VALUE
LOADING: Key8
LOADING: Key9
LOADING: Key3
REMOVED: Key7=Key7-VALUE
LOADING: Key0
REMOVED: Key6=Key6-VALUE
CacheStats{hitCount=8, missCount=12, loadSuccessCount=12, loadExceptionCount=0, 
totalLoadTime=563806, evictionCount=4}

It is important to note that entries were evicted BEFORE the maximum size of 10 was reached. In this case, an entry was removed when the cache had 7 entries in it.

The cache stats show that out of 20 calls to the cache, 12 missed and had to be loaded. However, 8 were successfully retrieved from the cache. 4 entries were evicted.