Least Recently Used (LRU) Eviction Strategy

[Turnerj]

Issue created from https://github.com/TurnerSoftware/CacheTower/issues/53#issuecomment-628631354

Currently the only eviction strategy is one of absolute time. If there was a method to define a "size" of cache, it would be worth exploring a "Least Recently Used" system to ensure that the hottest items stay in the cache.

Thoughts:

• Implement an extension (eg. AutoEvict/FixedCapacity) that manages the more advanced eviction strategy
• New extension tracks number of items in the cache, cache keys, expiry dates and last access dates
  • Could use a LinkedList to track most recently used or a timestamp directly
  • Probably easier with a ConcurrentDictionary with cache keys as the key and a custom type as the value
• Once a criteria has been hit (eg. X number of items in the cache), use what it knows to evict locally

Challenges:

• Keeping the extension up-to-date with cache data
  • Can use the various extension hooks but still is a bit fiddly
• Only evicting locally
  • Can do what I already do for RedisRemoteEvictionExtension (pass the cache layers in directly) but it is pretty cumbersome

Notes: To handle a distributed LRU would be excessively complex and likely not useful. Would mean that every access to a cache item (including local) would have to then broadcast that access back through the cache system and whatever distributed backends are used.

[Turnerj]

Might be worth investigating with or comparing against (when the time comes) this .NET caching solution which uses a LRU strategy: https://github.com/bitfaster/BitFaster.Caching

[prat0088]

That would be fantastic. LRU and bounded size are two requirements for my usage scenario.

[ghost]

This is something we are looking for in our team. It would be excellent to have this implemented

[Turnerj]

Thanks for your feedback - it won't make the next release (coming in the next few days) but it is definitely something I'm looking into!

[Turnerj]

(For my own reference)

An interesting LFU cache implementation: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/caching/a-constant-algorithm-for-implementing-the-lfu-cache-eviction-scheme.pdf

Not sure how applicable it is to this given its a LFU not an LRU plus it is a storage mechanism, not an eviction strategy. There still might be some useful pieces of information to extract from it.