Spring, Hibernate, EhCache Recipe

Spring, Hibernate, EhCache Recipe

A simple scenario explaining the usage and performance, when using EhCache along with Hibernate in a Spring environment. The performance results are taken using mySQL as the database. I started off my experiment with JBossCache, but had one hell of a time with it's configuration within Spring. [Download Sample Code]

In this example, I need to retrieve close to 5,000 records in a single fetch and then cache this information. As usual, setup Spring contexts in your Spring configuration file. I have just one bean, which is a Hibernate DAO, HibernateDoctorDAO.java. The dependency injection hierarchy is dataSource > sessionFactory > hibernateTemplate. hibernateTemplate is then injected into the HibernateDoctorDAO.java at runtime by the Spring Framework.

The implementations of each of these are:

dataSource > org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource

sessionFactory > org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean

hibernateTemplate > org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTemplate

The results clearly shows the difference in performance with EhCache enabled, even in this simple example:
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON (in seconds)
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QUERY FETCH TIME (INITIAL): 0.599
QUERY FETCH TIME (HIBERNATE CACHE): 0.212
QUERY FETCH TIME (2ND LEVEL CACHE): 0.091