JDK VS Caffeine

Compare JDK vs Caffeine and see what are their differences.

JDK

JDK main-line development https://openjdk.org/projects/jdk (by openjdk)

Caffeine

A high performance caching library for Java (by ben-manes)
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JDK Caffeine
191 43
18,393 15,204
2.1% -
10.0 9.7
about 22 hours ago 4 days ago
Java Java
GNU General Public License v3.0 only Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

JDK

Posts with mentions or reviews of JDK. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-19.
  • JEP draft: Exception handling in switch
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
  • Java 23: The New Features Are Officially Announced
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    Completely gutted from the OpenJDK, last I checked. See here for the culprit PR: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/pull/18688
  • macOS 14.4 might break Java on your machine
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
    > Yes, they're changing one aspect of signal handler use to work around this problem. They're not stopping the use of signal handlers in general. Hotspot continues to use signals for efficiency in general. See https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/9059727df135dc90311bd476...

    This whole thread is about SIGSEGV, and specifically their SIGSEGV handling. However, catching normal signals is not about efficiency.

    Some of their exception handling is still odd: There is no reason for a program that receives SIGILL to ever attempt continuing. But others is fine, like catching SIGFPE to just forward an exception to the calling code.

    (Sure, you could construct an argument to say that this is for efficiency if you considered the alternative to be implementing floating point in software so that all exceptions exist in user-space, but hardware floating point is the norm and such alternative would be wholly unreasonable.)

    > The wonderful thing about choosing not to care about facts is having whatever opinions you want.

    I appreciate the irony of you making such statement, proudly thinking that your opinion equals fact, and therefore any other opinion is not.

    This discussion is nothing but subjective opinion vs. subjective opinion. Facts are (hopefully, as I can only speak for myself) inputs to both our opinions, but no opinion about "good" or "bad", "nasty" or not can ever be objective. Objective code quality does not exist.

  • The Return of the Frame Pointers
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2024
    I remember talking to Brendan about the PreserveFramePointer patch during my first months at Netflix in 2015. As of JDK 21, unfortunately it is no longer a general purpose solution for the JVM, because it prevents a fast path being taken for stack thawing for virtual threads: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/d32ce65781c1d7815a69ceac...
  • JDK-8180450: secondary_super_cache does not scale well
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Mar 2024
  • The One Billion Row Challenge
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2024
  • AVX2 intrinsics for Arrays.sort methods (int, float arrays)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023
  • A gentle introduction to two's complement
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Nov 2023
  • Java JEP 461: Stream Gatherers
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023
    Map doesn't implement the Collection interface.

    https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/sha...

  • C++23: Removing garbage collection support
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
    C++ lets you write anything you can imagine, and the language features and standard library often facilitate that. The committee espouses the view that they want to provide many "zero [runtime] cost," abstractions. Anybody can contribute to the language, although the committee process is often slow and can be political, each release the surface area and capability of the language gets larger.

    I believe Hazard Pointers are slated for C++26, and these will add a form "free later, but not quite garbage collection" to the language. There was a talk this year about using hazard pointers to implement a much faster std::shared_ptr.

    It's a language with incredible depth because so many different paradigms have been implemented in it, but also has many pitfalls for new and old users because there are many different ways of solving the same problem.

    I feel that in C++, more than any other language, you need to know the actual implementation under the hood to use it effectively. This means knowing not just what the language specifies, but can occaissionally require knowing what GCC or Clang generate on your particular hardware.

    Many garbage collected languages are written in or have parts of their implementations in C++. See JS (https://github.com/v8/v8)and Java GC (https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/tree/36de19d4622e38b6c00644b0...)

    I am not an expert on Java (or C++), so if someone knows better or can add more please correct me.

Caffeine

Posts with mentions or reviews of Caffeine. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-23.
  • Otter, Fastest Go in-memory cache based on S3-FIFO algorithm
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2023
    /u/someplaceguy,

    Those LIRS traces, along with many others, available at this page [1]. I did a cursory review using their traces using Caffeine's and the author's simulators to avoid bias or a mistaken implementation. In their target workloads Caffeine was on par or better [2]. I have not seen anything novel in this or their previous works and find their claims to be easily disproven, so I have not implement this policy in Caffeine simulator yet.

    [1]: https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/wiki/Simulator

    [2]: https://github.com/1a1a11a/libCacheSim/discussions/20

  • Google/guava: Google core libraries for Java
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Nov 2023
    That, and also when caffeine came out it replaced one of the major uses (caching) of guava.

    https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine

  • GC, hands off my data!
    6 projects | dev.to | 27 Oct 2023
    I decided to start with an overview of what open-source options are currently available. When it comes to the implementation of the on-heap cache mechanism, the options are numerous – there is well known: guava, ehcache, caffeine and many other solutions. However, when I began researching cache mechanisms offering the possibility of storing data outside GC control, I found out that there are very few solutions left. Out of the popular ones, only Terracotta is supported. It seems that this is a very niche solution and we do not have many options to choose from. In terms of less-known projects, I came across Chronicle-Map, MapDB and OHC. I chose the last one because it was created as part of the Cassandra project, which I had some experience with and was curious about how this component worked:
  • Spring Cache with Caffeine
    2 projects | dev.to | 22 Oct 2023
    Visit the official Caffeine git project and documentation here for more information if you are interested in the subject.
  • Helidon Níma is the first Java microservices framework based on virtual threads
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2023
    not to distract from your valid points but, when used properly, Caffeine + Reactor can work together really nicely [1].

    [1] https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/tree/master/examples/c...

  • FIFO-Reinsertion is better than LRU [pdf]
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jun 2023
    Yes, I think that is my main concern in that often research papers do not disclose the weaknesses of their approaches and the opposing tradeoffs. There is no silver bullet.

    The stress workload that I use is to chain corda-large [1], 5x loop [2], corda-large at a cache size of 512 entries and 6M requests. This shifts from a strongly LRU-biased pattern to an MRU one, and then back again. My solution to this was to use hill climbing by sampling the hit rate to adaptively size of the admission window (aka your FIFO) to reconfigure the cache region sizes. You already have similar code in your CACHEUS implementation which built on that idea to apply it to a multi-agent policy.

    Caffeine adjusts the frequency comparison for admission slightly to allow ~1% of losing warm candidates to enter the main region. This is to protect against hash flooding attack (HashDoS) [3]. That isn't intended to improve or correct the policy's decision making so should be unrelated to your observations, but an important change for real-world usage.

    I believe LIRS2 [4] adaptively sizes their LIR region, but I do not recall the details as a complex algorithm. It did very well across different workloads when I tried it out and the authors were able to make a few performance fixes based on my feedback. Unfortunately I find LIRS algorithms to be too difficult to maintain for an industry setting because while excellent, the implementation logic is not intuitive which makes it frustrating to debug.

    [1] https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/blob/master/simulator/...

  • Guava 32.0 (released today) and the @Beta annotation
    5 projects | /r/java | 30 May 2023
    A lot of Guava's most popular libraries graduated to the JDK. Also Caffeine is the evolution of our c.g.common.cache library. So you need Guava less than you used to. Hooray!
  • Monitoring Guava Cache Statistics
    1 project | /r/java | 30 May 2023
  • Apache Baremaps: online maps toolkit
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2023
    Unfortunately, I don't gather statistics on the demonstration server. I believe that the in-memory caffeine cache (https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine) saved me.
  • Similar probabilistic algorithms like Hyperloglog?
    1 project | /r/compsci | 19 Mar 2023
    Caffeine is a Java cache that uses a 4-bit count-min sketch to estimate the popularity of an entry over a sample period. This is used by an admission filter (TinyLFU) to determine whether the new arrival is more valuable than the LRU victim. This is combined with hill climbing to optimize how much space is allocated for frequency vs recency. That results in an adaptive eviction policy that is space and time efficient, and achieves very high hit rates.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing JDK and Caffeine you can also consider the following projects:

Graal - GraalVM compiles Java applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀

Ehcache - Ehcache 3.x line

aircraft - The A32NX & A380X Project are community driven open source projects to create free Airbus aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator that are as close to reality as possible.

Hazelcast - Hazelcast is a unified real-time data platform combining stream processing with a fast data store, allowing customers to act instantly on data-in-motion for real-time insights.

steam-runtime - A runtime environment for Steam applications

cache2k - Lightweight, high performance Java caching

OkHttp - Square’s meticulous HTTP client for the JVM, Android, and GraalVM.

Apache Geode - Apache Geode

kitten - A statically typed concatenative systems programming language.

Guava - Google core libraries for Java

intellij-community - IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition & IntelliJ Platform

scaffeine - Thin Scala wrapper for Caffeine (https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine)