Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Barton <>]

Excellent. You are most definitely not insane. :-)

Shilen Patel wrote:
> 1.  Using ehcache and adding a new cache type in grouper.ehcache.xml, 
> I've adding caching to Member objects in GrouperAccessAdapter.

Given #3 below, how does this actually net an improvement? Inquiring 
minds want to know ...

> 2.  The next modification is related to scoping the results.  To 
> determine if a group or a stem (X) is a child of another stem (Y), the 
> API currently does some recursive checks up the hierarchy of X to see if 
> Y is found.  Instead I made a modification to just check the object 
> names.  If the name of X starts with the name of Y, then X is a child of Y.

If this makes a substantial difference in performance, it's probably 
worth it to bake this assumption into code and forever link names to 
locations. If not, it might be best to continue to evaluate this 
relationship structurally. Would this constrain our options when we get 
around to implementing support for moving and copying groups & stem 
hierarchies around?

> 3.  To do the actual database search for the groups, the API currently 
> first gets a list of all group attribute ids by doing 1 query.  For the 
> ECON example above, that would result in a list of 3120 group attribute 
> ids.  Next, the API performs 3120 queries to retrieve all of the group 
> attribute data.  Then there will be another 3120 queries to get the 
> group data.  So that's 6241 queries.  Furthermore, say sometime in the 
> future you want to call group.getName() on all of the 3120 groups, that 
> will result in 15,000 more queries.  Anyways, so I reduced all that down 
> to 1 query that takes about 5 seconds.  I've set the group attributes as 
> a property of the group so that additional queries to get group 
> attributes are not needed.  I did not use ehcache for this, although 
> that might be something to think about.  Any thoughts on whether there 
> will be problems if group attributes are queried and saved ahead of time 
> like this?

When you say attributes are made a property of the group, are you 
referring to a hibernate construct? Is that the same for hibernate 2 & 
3? Would a caching approach loose effectiveness as the number of search 
hits exceeds cache size?

I can't think of a downside to pre-fetching group attributes.

Tom