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I'd prefer to just set a different expectation for the user.  Rather than worrying about state change and invalidation, lets just set the expectation that the system as a whole is eventually consistent.  I would love to prevent any cache busting strategies or expectations as well as anything that requires something other than time based data refreshing.  We can all agree, I hope, that there is some level of eventual consistency even without caching in our current system.  The fact is that db updates are not instantaneous with other changes in the system; see snapshotting, instance creation, etc.  

What I'd like to see is additional fields included in the API response that how old this particular piece of data is.  This way the consumer can decide if they need to be concerned about the fact that this state hasn't changed, and it allows operators to tune their system to whatever their deployments can handle.  If we are exploring caching, I think that gives us the advantage of not a lot of extra code that worries about invalidation, allowing deployers to not use caching at all if its unneeded, and paves the way for view tables in large deployments which I think is important when we are thinking about this on a large scale.

Gabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openstack-
> bounces+gabe.westmaas=rackspace.com at lists.launchpad.net
> [mailto:openstack-
> bounces+gabe.westmaas=rackspace.com at lists.launchpad.net] On Behalf Of
> Sandy Walsh
> Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 7:58 AM
> To: Joshua Harlow
> Cc: openstack
> Subject: Re: [Openstack] Caching strategies in Nova ...
> 
> Was reading up some more on cache invalidation schemes last night. The
> best practice approach seems to be using a sequence ID in the key. When
> you want to invalidate a large set of keys, just bump the sequence id.
> 
> This could easily be handled with a notifier that listens to instance state
> changes.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> On 03/22/2012 09:28 PM, Joshua Harlow wrote:
> > Just from experience.
> >
> > They do a great job. But the killer thing about caching is how u do
> > the cache invalidation.
> >
> > Just caching stuff is easy-peasy, making sure it is invalidated on all
> > servers in all conditions, not so easy...
> >
> > On 3/22/12 4:26 PM, "Sandy Walsh" <sandy.walsh at rackspace.com> wrote:
> >
> >     We're doing tests to find out where the bottlenecks are, caching is the
> >     most obvious solution, but there may be others. Tools like memcache do
> a
> >     really good job of sharing memory across servers so we don't have to
> >     reinvent the wheel or hit the db at all.
> >
> >     In addition to looking into caching technologies/approaches we're gluing
> >     together some tools for finding those bottlenecks. Our first step will
> >     be finding them, then squashing them ... however.
> >
> >     -S
> >
> >     On 03/22/2012 06:25 PM, Mark Washenberger wrote:
> >     > What problems are caching strategies supposed to solve?
> >     >
> >     > On the nova compute side, it seems like streamlining db access and
> >     > api-view tables would solve any performance problems caching would
> >     > address, while keeping the stale data management problem small.
> >     >
> >
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