Ok.

So I saw a performance benchmarking report recently. We tested JPetClinic domain model being written to through Hibernate. With Terracotta as second level cache, we could do upwards of 200,000 reads per second on 8 JVM cluster. And 150K reads / writes at 90/10 ratio (creating new pets and appointments 10% of the time) on that same 8 JVM cluster. This is 30X faster than a few options we benchmarked against (after paying experts to tune the other options...not just benchmarking on our own). The other options did more like 5K tps from the same cluster. And MySQL by itself w/o a second level cache could support 1.1K tps (136X faster for Terracotta).

I can't wait to do the webinar for everyone on what we have done in this 3.1 release. Basically, we are delivering the power and scalability of the best of distributed caching architectures--the latest and greatest in application design--but through the Hibernate / RDBMS model most apps already use. Things are really getting fun for me and for us now.

--Ari

Fair enough: Steve is our head of engineering and I generally hate when people do this sort of cross-posting thing but his post is actually very educational:
http://dsoguy.blogspot.com/2009/08/distributed-data-structures.html

Makes me want to write a post on performance benchmarking with Terracotta. Very few users seem to know what they want to test, what their tests are actually testing, and how to test what they need.

I think its time to clear that up with a bit of framework magic and general documentation. Definitely need to find a way to start immediately on this project, for the betterment of all distributed cache users, not just Terracotta users :)

--Ari

d7073c02eca990a65c2c4c911fe33b20

--Ari

I am very pleased to be able to announce that Terracotta and EHCache are now one.

If you were curious what this hash is: ? d7073c02eca990a65c2c4c911fe33b20 ?

It is the Md5 hash of the contract between Terracotta and EHCache leadership that both cements and represents this new day in Enterprise Java scalability.

The rationale

EHCache has massive adoption...
EHCache provides the world-standard caching interface (both de facto and soon, JSR-107) to Java applications; and it is easy to use. EHCache has hundreds of thousands if not millions of production deployments. And EHCache is embedded in many popular products from the Spring framework, to Liferay, to Alfresco, to Documentum, to Hibernate. If you name it, it is likely using EHCache.

Terracotta has a proven open source scalability solution...
Terracotta provides the world's best open source Java clustering and HA platform on which to run Enterprise-class applications. Terracotta is used underneath hundreds of the world's most critical applications. Terracotta's interface in more than 50% of use cases has been EHCache. Basically, developers design applications to use EHCache and use Terracotta's EHCache clustering module to get massive scale and high availability at runtime.

The two together will provide the most seamless path from 1 node up to 100. Instead of having to worry about which version of EHCache Terracotta supports, or if your EHCache integration will work well with Terracotta, EHCache's and Terracotta's users alike can rest assured the two will always work in perfect harmony from today forward.

This makes Terracotta + EHCache the largest vendor in the market focused only on Java scalability and reliability.

What this means for EHCache Users

EHCache users will get a few things:
1. The same Apache 2 license they currently rely on
2. A new hosting environment operated by Terracotta with state-of-the-art forums, source contro, maven infrastructure, etc. all running alongside sourceforge infrastructure that will remain in place
3. a dedicated team of engineers working full-time on EHCache performance and features
4. Direct upgrade path to Terracotta that is seamless and nearly configurationless
5. Enterprise support and training for existing EHCache installations

Terracotta users will get a few things as well:
1. EHCache interfaces will replace Terracotta distributed cache as a single caching interface / standard for Terracotta distributed caching
2. a single-node version of Terracotta that can run on the desktop w/o our server array
3. Full freedom to run on the latest version of EHCache at all times, knowing it works with Terracotta
4. One vendor support structure for their caching interfaces / libraries as well as their scalability / reliability runtime.

Now the fun begins

Next steps together
1. Greg Luck's role will be as CTO of EHCache here at Terracotta, reporting to me
2. We will merge our product roadmaps including, seamless upgrade from 1 EHCache node to 100's as well as adding some new interfaces / APIs around searching / indexing caches, etc.

We now have a very well rounded solution for Enterprise Java applications. The decision about where to keep state has always gone in the database's favor save for the most highly trafficked sites and systems. That's fine by us. Keep the data in the database. Just cache your catalogs, products, and users with EHCache, through Hibernate or directly from JDBC to EHCache by hand. Write your sales orders, trades, matching operations to Terracotta and write-behind to the database or just write-through--both will be fast. And build your conversational state in memory using HTTP Session and Terracotta container clustering or use EHCache directly. With our EHCache distributed cache, our HTTP Session product, and our core DSO platform you can do all 3 in the same application without giving up your database and without sacrificing scale or performance.

The marriage of EHCache and Terracotta: a wedding where you can have your cake and eat it too - scalability and ease of use without having to worry about side effects or impacts.

Here's to Java and the Java Community

--Ari

Quick congrats to SpringSource and Cloud Foundry.

Chris Richardson has been a friend of Terracotta for years and we are glad his latest ideas landed somewhere so great to be.

The great news for Terracotta's community is that Cloud Tools and CloudFoundry.com both support Terracotta, directly.

So with our own puppet master-based experiments in the Cloud plus CloudFoundry being part of SpringSource, I guess Terracotta has just been thrust into cloud computing.

Gotta love open source :)

BTW, email me if you want access to or help with our puppet + Terracotta AMI. I would love the feedback.

Thanks,

--Ari