Oracle Coherence: How to set the timeout on an invoke call in a replicated cache?

Question

I have a replicated cache running on a number of weblogic nodes which are also running OSB. The cache is started with the server as a startup class. It has a very simple cache of objects that simply track whether they are in use or not with a boolean attribute "available".

From OSB I am making java callouts to the same class, which call "invoke" on the cache with a processor that marks the object as unavailable and then runs Thread.sleep(31000). This is a placeholder for some lengthy processing I want to add later.

What I want to happen, is if the invoke() call takes too long, the process should time out and return or throw an exception. So I have been trying to configure a request timeout of 30000 milliseconds to test this. Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to make this timeout happen.

I have tried:

• Wrapping the processor in a PriorityProcessor and calling setRequestTimeout(30000) before invoke()

• Adding <request-timeout >30000 </request-timeout > to the <replicated-scheme/ > element in the cache config

• Adding <tasktimeout >30000 </tasktimeout > to the <replicated-scheme/ > element in the cache config

• Adding <guardian-timeout >30000 </guardian-timeout > to the <replicated-scheme/ > element in the cache config

• Creating a tangosol-coherence-override.xml and adding a guardian-timeout <init-param > to a <service > element who's "type" matches the service "name" in the cache config

• Changing the sleep() call to Thread.sleep(310000) just to see if any out-of-box default will kick in after 5 minutes.

None of these result in any kind of timeout, the processor simply sleeps for however long I told it to and then returns with no error.

Has anyone done something similar before and can give me some advice? It would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

James

Answer 1

OK, so I have the answer, with some help from Tim Middleton .

Basically the replicated cache doesn't support timeouts, and it turns out that it wasn't an appropriate choice for my system anyway!

The solution is:

1. Switch to a <distributed-cache > scheme in the cache config.
2. Add a <thread-count > element to the scheme with a number > 1 (I chose 10 but it's just however many concurrent instances you want to support).
3. Use a PriorityProcessor to wrap the EntryProcessor and set the timeout with setRequestTimeoutMillis() before calling invoke(). (Note this is the first thing I tried, but with the wrong kind of cache as it turns out)