I've seen references to the new plugin cache provider features of Hibernate 2.1. Other than Tangosol Coherence, I do not see any other implementations mentioned.

First, can someone discuss what problems we are likely to run into with JCS in a single Tomcat environment?

From the documentation it seems that the distributed option of JCS is not viable for multiple Tomcat servers hitting a single database - right?

Tangosol may be worth the price for large sites, but other than JCS are there other alternatives that will be supported? I've googled a bit and come up with a quick list of alternatives, but have not yet qualified them:

SpiritCache (http://www.spirit-soft.com)
OSCache (http://www.opensymphony.com/oscache/)

Oracle also has an option, but we are using MySQL at this point.

As a side note, Tangosol (like most other vendors) have gone to per-processor pricing. It is so inexpensive (+10-15%) to add dual processors to servers these days that we just always do it - but oops! your software price just doubled (+100%)!

Oh, and there is also SwarmCache at http://swarmcache.sourceforge.net/

OK, no bytes.

Can anyone on the list at leat discuss or tell about problems they have had with JCS? Is it being used in significant production environments.

Our application is still under 5,000 dynamic page views per day - is JCS being used in more intensive environments successfully?