Oracle coherence: is there a way to force the invocation of an agent on a specific node?

I have a replicated cluster composed by several nodes (up to 30) on which there is a single JAVA process accessing to the coherence cache and I use the map.invoke(key, agent) method for both creation and update of agents. The creation and the update are performed setting the value in the process method.

Example (agent is instance of a ConcreteEntryProcessor implementing EntryProcessor interface):

map.invoke(key, agent);

Which invoke the following code of agent object:

public Object process(Entry entry) {
  if (entry.isPresent())
  {
    //UPDATE
    ... some stuff which compute the new entry value...
    entry.setValue(newValue, true);
    return newValue
  }
  else
  {
    //CREATION 
    ..other stuff to determine the value...
    entry.setValue(value, true);
    return value;
  }
}

I noticed that if the update is made by the node that created the agent I have good performances, otherwise I have a performance decrease if the update is made from a different node. It seems that there is a kind of ownership of data.

Is there a way to force the execution of an agent on the local node or change the ownership of data?

It all depends on cache configuration. If you use distributed (partitioned) cache, then indeed there is some kind of data ownership. In that case entry processor is invoked on a node that owns given key.

And according to your performance issues, I see two possibilities:

1. Performance of map.invoke(key, agent) decreases, but performance of EntryProcessor.process(entry) is stable. In that case your performance issues are probably caused by serialization and network traffic needed to send back the result of processing to the node that called map.invoke(key, agent). If you don't need this value on that node, then simply return null from your entry processor.

2. Performance of EntryProcessor.process(entry) decreases. In that case mayby your create/update logic need some data from the node that called map.invoke(key, agent). So it is again serialization/network traffic issue, but without knowing the details of your particular logic it is hard to find a solution to your issue.