We've found that our application is not useable (according to our customers) without entity caching enabled.
Like I emailed previously, we've made extensive improvements on the entity cache to increase the hit rate (only store value once if fetched by pkey and then in an entity condition) and lower memory consumption, store objects in dictionary, so that singleton for each Object fetched from db, String.intern() some Field values to make "PARTY".equals(..) checks faster, etc.... All these changes are required for multi-tenant systems where the is a rather high degree of redundant information in each tenant instance. (think of enumerations, types, etc...) Copy on write database objects, so developer doesn't need to worry about corrupting other users of the data if they want/need to modify an entity. Transactional support for the cache. (bug vs design choice in my opinion). We've turned on entity caching by "default", and would like to remove the useCache from the api. Don't mind returning a non-caching delegator via a delegator decorator, that way, there is no API difference. The "don't need to cache" issue is handled by adding a WeakReference cache instance on top of SoftReference. This makes it so that as long as the JVM has it in memory, why not re-use it? I prefer to let the framework take care caching (and for how long, etc...) for me. Marc
