[SOLVED] Java object caching, which is faster, reading from a file or from a remote machine?

Java object caching, which is faster, reading from a file or from a remote machine?

I am at a point where I need to take the decision on what to do when caching of objects reaches the configured threshold.

Should I store the objects in a indexed file (like provided by JCS) and read them from the file (file IO) when required or have the object stored in a distributed cache (network, serialization, deserialization)

We are using Solaris as OS.

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Adding some more information.

I have this question so as to determine if I can switch to distributed caching. The remote server which will have cache will have more memory and better disk and this remote server will only be used for caching.

One of the problems we cannot increase the locally cached objects is , it stores the cached objects in JVM heap which has limited memory(using 32bit JVM).

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Thanks, we finally ended up choosing Coherence as our Cache product. This provides many cache configuration topologies, in process vs remote vs disk ..etc.

Solution

It's going to depend on many things such as disk speed, network latency and the amount of data, so some experimentation might be the best way to get an idea. I recommend you have a look at http://ehcache.org/, it might come in handy.