So it turns out I found another bug in the ehCache extension. The RMI URLs are being cast to lower case, which breaks the configuration if your cache name has any upper case characters.

@zackster Where's a good place to discuss some changes to the ehCache plugin? The current admin UI is a little misleading and I think there are some things that could be done to simplify things. Should I just open a Jira issue?

@bdw429s I would love to get your feedback on some ideas as well.

Anyway, in a nutshell, I think the ehCache stuff could be simplified quite a bit with a few changes, but it might break the mental model for users because it would not match up with the way you'd configure the ehcache.xml directly. Today, to get ehCache working in distributed mode, you first need to download my fixes. It's just plain broken without it! However, if you're trying to configure "manual discovery", there are a few things that are not clear from the admin: 1. The RMI URLs, must contain not only a hostname:port, but also the current cache name. So, you can't just do:

192.168.1.20:40001|192.168.1.30:40001

, you would need

192.168.1.20:40001/CurrentCacheName|192.168.1.30:40001/CurrentCacheName

. That seems odd to me that you'd need to duplicate the cache name. Seems like Lucee should just add that for you. 2. This is an ehCache thing, but in the RMI URLs you must exclude the current server from the list of listeners. This makes it difficult to push out Lucee configurations to a pool of servers, because you need to push a different configuration out to each node. For example, if you have 3 nodes (A, B, C), then node A must set up B & C, node B set up A & C and finally node C would set up A & B. I think it would simplify things a lot if Lucee would just ignore any hosts that match the current server. This might be difficult to do if not using IP addresses, but if it can be done, it would allow the same configuration to be pushed out to each node. 3. The "Listener" port is required for both automatic and distributed mode. Since it's required, we could simplify the RMI URLs even more by not making the port required. The only use case where this could be a problem is if you're using different ports for each host. However, if the port is supplied, we use the port supplied. So, if you were using port 40001 for your RMI listener, you could just configure the RMI setup with hostname A,B,C on each server. It would automatically append the cachenames and port (when applicable) and ignore hostnames that match the current server. I think this would simplify things greatly.

jira tickets aren't the place for discussions

I assume the code in question is part of the exchache extension

Tickets for extensions still go in JIRA FWIW

And the extension code will be in a separate repo from Lucee itself

I've never touched the ehcache extension, but Zac has a lot of knowledge around compiling and testing extensions.

a few test cases are failing, i had to approve your first run, any subsequent commits / prs will now be automatically CI-ed https://github.com/lucee/extension-ehcache/runs/6631576508?check_suite_focus=true#step:9:456

I will add that I did change how serialization works in the ehcache extension to fix some bugs and improver performance. For example, there was no reason to serialize objects when the cached object is not be pushed to other servers in the distributed configuration (which is honestly the way ehCache should be configured). You normally only want to have ehCache announce that a key should be invalidated to the other nodes and let the nodes then regenerated the value and put it into cache when needed. The only time you'd really want to have the cached item propagated to your other nodes is if the creating of the object has a high cost.

@bdw429s / @zackster , So I finally created a thread to discuss changes to the ehCache extension: https://dev.lucee.org/t/improving-the-ehcache-extension/10326

ok, balls in my court, 0 tests found to run, sigh

all the ehcache tests are tagged with

labels="cache,ehCache"

but i'm only specifying

ehCache

ok, fixed that, if you rebase your PR it should all work. I also updated the extension to target java 1.8

hmmmf, almost! works on my machine lol

dunno if i shared this with you before, this little script allows you to run all the tests locally, just like github actions does just need to checkout lucee/lucee 6 and lucee/script-runner as per the paths (or tweak em)