Hibernate in Action says the read-write concurrency strategy is "available only in non-clustered environments". Is this true for any cache provider because of a fundamental reason in Hibernate or is the statement just referring to those cache providers that come with Hibernate? If the former, why is this?

If possible I'd like to use the read-wite strategy with JCS cache.

Thanks,
David

Similarly, the book "NHibernate in Action" also mentioned the read-write strategy "available only in non-clustered environments".

We would like to know if distributed cache provider like NHibernate.Caches.MemCache.MemCacheProvider can works with the read-write strategy or not. Thanks.

Billy

The JavaDoc for org.hibernate.cache.ReadWriteCache (the class that implements the read-write strategy) says this strategy may be used in a cluster, depending on the underlying cache implementation:


As far as I can see, however, you could use a non-locking async cache such as EhCache as long as you accept the possibility for cache inconsistencies. If you're very cautious in choosing things to be cached (very rarely updated) the chance of an inconsistency arising would be very small. The risk can be further mitigated by configuring the cache to invalidate rather than replicate. In any case, depending on the nature of the application, inconsistencies may be acceptable. Any inconsistencies that do arise can be flushed occasionally by setting a suitable timeout (e.g. 1 hour).