How Eviction Works

Eviction settings cause vFabric GemFire to work to keep a region's resource use under a specified level by removing least recently used (LRU) entries to make way for new entries.

You configure for eviction based on entry count, percentage of available heap, and absolute memory usage. You also configure what to do when you need to evict: destroy entries or overflow them to disk. See Persistence and Overflow.

When GemFire determines that adding or updating an entry would take the region over the specified level, it overflows or removes enough older entries to make room. For entry count eviction, this means a one-to-one trade of an older entry for the newer one. For the memory settings, the number of older entries that need to be removed to make space depends entirely on the relative sizes of the older and newer entries.

Eviction in Partitioned Regions

In partitioned regions, GemFire removes the oldest entry it can find in the bucket where the new entry operation is being performed. GemFire maintains LRU entry information on a bucket-by-bucket bases, as the cost of maintaining information across the partitioned region would be too great a performance hit.

For memory and entry count eviction, LRU eviction is done in the bucket where the new entry operation is being performed until the overall size of the combined buckets in the member has dropped enough to perform the operation without going over the limit.
For heap eviction, each partitioned region bucket is treated as if it were a separate region, with each eviction action only considering the LRU for the bucket, and not the partitioned region as a whole.

Because of this, eviction in partitioned regions may leave older entries for the region in other buckets in the local data store as well as in other stores in the distributed system. It may also leave entries in a primary copy that it evicts from a secondary copy or vice-versa.