Faster Infinispan-based Second Level Cache coming to a JPA app near you!

Starting with Hibernate 4.0.0.Beta1, Infinispan second level cache interacts with the transaction manager as a JTA Synchronization instead of an XA resource. Based on some testing we've done in JBoss AS 7, this has resulted in a huge performance increase thanks to the optimisations the transaction manager can apply to Synchronizations, which work very well when Infinispan is used as a cache rather than as a authoritative data store.

From an Infinispan configuration perspective, nothing needs changing. The Infinispan provider still uses the same base configuration by default. Transactional configuration happens within the cache provider itself and it's here where the Infinispan is configured with Hibernate's transaction manager and where Infinispan is configured to participate as a JTA synchronization. This is the default configuration, so from an user perspective, there's nothing you have to do to take advantage of this new change.

However, you can always switch back to previous behaviour where Infinispan interacted as an XA resource via a dedicated Hibernate property called hibernate.cache.infinispan.use_synchronization

By default this property is set to true. If you set it false, Infinispan will interact with the transaction manager as an XA resource.

For more detailed information, check the "Using Infinispan As JPA Hibernate Second Level Cache Provider" wiki.

Cheers,

Galder