What consistency guarantees do I have with different Asynchronous processing settings ?

There are 3 main configuration settings (modes of usage) that affect the behaviour of Infinispan in terms of Asynchronous processing, summarized in the following table:

Config / Mode of usage	Description
API	Usage ofAsynchronous API, i.e. methods of the Cache interface like e.g. putAsync(key, val)
Marshalling	Allowing Asynchronous Marshalling, in cache configuration (via XML or programmatic configuration)
Replication	Configuring a clustered cache to replicate data asychronously. In Infinispan XML configuration this is done by using <sync> or <async> sub-elements under<clustering> element.

Switching to asynchronous mode in each of these areas causes loss of some consistency guarrantees. The known problems are summarised here:

API	Replication	Marshalling	Consistency problems
Sync	Sync	Sync
Sync	Async	Sync	1 - Cache entry is replicated with a delay or not at all in case of network error. 2 - Node where the operation originated won't be notified about errors that happened on network or on the receiving side.
Sync	Async	Async	1, 2 3 - Calling order of sync API method might not be preserved – depends on which operation finishes marshalling first in the asyncExecutor 4 - Replication of put operation can be applied on different nodes in different order – this may result in inconsistent values
Async	Sync	Sync	3
Async	Async	Sync	1, 2, 3
Async	Async	Async	1, 2, 3, 4

JBoss Community Archive (Read Only)

Infinispan 5.2

What consistency guarantees do I have with different Asynchronous processing settings ?