Chapter 15. Eviction

Eviction is the process of removing entries from memory to prevent running out of memory. Entries that are evicted from memory remain in cache stores and the rest of the cluster to prevent permanent data loss.

JBoss Data Grid executes eviction tasks by utilizing user threads which are already interacting with the data container. JBoss Data Grid uses a separate thread to prune expired cache entries from the cache.

Eviction occurs individually on a per node basis, rather than occurring as a cluster-wide operation. Each node uses an eviction thread to analyze the contents of its in-memory container to determine which entries require eviction. The free memory in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is not a consideration during the eviction analysis, even as a threshold to initialize entry eviction.

In JBoss Data Grid, eviction provides a mechanism to efficiently remove entries from the in-memory representation of a cache and push them to a persistent store. This ensures that the memory can always accommodate new entries as they are fetched and that evicted entries are preserved in the cluster instead of lost.

Additionally, eviction strategies can be used as required for your configuration to set up which entries are evicted and when eviction occurs.