Cache consistency issues in distributed applications

Your typical enterprise web application is

Going to the database for every read or write is expensive. Developers try to improve read performance by storing values in a cache like memcached or redis.

Cache is in memory storage. Performance is greatly improved by reading from memory than going to secondary storage like disk where database or files.

On reads, the application first checks cache. If the value is found in cache, it read from there. On a cache miss, the app will read from database and then update the cache so the subsequent reads do not go to the database.

On writes,the application needs to write to the database and update the cache as well, so the subsequent reads get the updated value.

The approach of using a cache to improve read performance works very well when your reads greatly outnumber writes. That is say most requests are reading ( say 80%) and few requests update the data.

Frequent writes or updates to data complicate matters. Any writes to the database need to be reflected in the cache.

1.0 Common mistakes with caches:

These problems are mostly caused by multiple clients threads (improperly) updating the cache.

1.1. Race condition between reader / writer threads

Thread 1 wants to read a value.
It goes to cache and does not find it.
It reads the value from DB

Thread 2 updates the value in DB and updates the cache

Thread 1 sets the outdated value in cache.
Until there is another update to the same value, every one is reading the outdated value.

1.2 Race condition between writer threads

Minor variation of  1.1

 At time t1, thread1 updates database value x to x1

At time t2, thread2 update database value to x2.
thread2 updates cache value to x2.

thread1 overwrites x2 to x1.

Subsequent readers are reading an incorrect value x1.

Soln : locking x in cache, update database, update cache , release lock on x
downside : locking in 2 places cache and db deadlocks

1.3  Cache not cleaned up on database rollback

This happens when cache is updated prior to database transaction commit.

thread 1 update value in db
before the transaction commits, it updates the cache
transaction rolls back
cache has outdated value

1.4 Reading before commit

This is a rare situation that could happen when cache is updated post database transaction commit.

Thread 1 is in the process of updating a value x.
x is uncommitted.
cache is not updated.

Other parts of code in Thread read the value from cache for other purposes. They reading an out dated value.

Soln: A thread that needs to reuse values it changed should store values locally and use from local until the value is committed to both database and cache.

2.0 Strategies for elimination cache race conditions :

2.1 Locking the value in cache

The strategy is

-- lock the value to be updated in cache
-- update in database
-- update in cache
-- unlock the cache lock

While this can work, the disadvantage of this approach is

-- locking twice. Database transaction does some locking. Now we have additional locking in cache. Negative for performance
-- Improper locking can lead to deadlocks

2.2 Checking timestamps and/or previous values

In the cache , in addition to value, store the update timestamp from db.
Before updating the cache, check the timestamp and only update if you have a latter timestamp.

If you do not want the overhead of storing timestamp in cache, another approach could

-- 1 previous value =   read the cache value before db operation
-- 2 do the database operation
    3 new value =   get the latest db value
-- 4 compare and swap : set new value in cache, if current cache value == previous value
-- 5  if 4 succeeded , we are done
-- 6 previous value = current cache. Goto 3

2.3 Update cache using an updater thread

Any thread with a db operation like create , update, or even a read after a cache miss, does not directly update the cache.

Instead the request to update cache is put on a queue. Another thread reads the message one by one and updates the cache.

A disadvantage is that there is time delay before the updated value is available in  cache. Also in the case of cache misses, you might see multiple messages in the queue for the same cache update.

This is the preferred solution. If you can tolerate the time delay, it can eliminate race conditions and is easy to implement.

2.4 Versioning

We can steal ideas from MVCC which is used in database

The locking strategy in 1 locks both readers and writers.

We can improve on this by not requiring reads to locks.

Readers reads the latest snapshot value.
Writers lock not the value but a copy of the value. We allow only one copy additional writers will be blocked.
When the write is done with update ( commit), the updated copy is copied to the snapshot.

You can reduce the locking on writer even further by each writer his copy. Also assign say a version or transaction id to each copy. When a transaction commits, copy the value to snapshot.

3.0 Conclusion

In summary, consistency problems can arise due to multiple threads updating a cache and the backing database. Option 3 , updating the cache using a single update thread and fix these issues. This is a simple solution that will work for most scenarios. Option 2 is a non locking technique. Option 1 locking is the least scalable.Option 4 versioning is the most work to implement.