HTTP Caching

[SCjona]

Issue type

performance improvement

Description

The plugin performs repeated HTTP requests which can be cached (URL and time based).

See this log (code modified to see HTTP GET requests)

``` 2024-09-26 11:33:07,754 [ 145098] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@mui/icons-material/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:08,436 [ 145780] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@mui/icons-material/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:13,038 [ 150382] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@mui/material/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:13,732 [ 151076] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@mui/material/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:14,304 [ 151648] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@types/node/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:15,235 [ 152579] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@types/node/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:16,330 [ 153674] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@types/react-signature-canvas/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:17,024 [ 154368] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/@types/react-signature-canvas/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:19,101 [ 156445] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/libphonenumber-js/latest 2024-09-26 11:33:19,603 [ 156947] FINE - #com.github.warningimhack3r.npmupdatedependencies.backend.engine.NPMJSClient - HTTP GET https://registry.npmjs.org/libphonenumber-js/latest ```

Special case

• [X] This is not a bug nor a feature request, I can't use other templates

[SCjona]

@WarningImHack3r maybe you should consider using a lib for caching e.g. https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/CachesExplained

[WarningImHack3r]

I wasn’t willing to use a (heavy?) library just for that and caching one HTTP request tbh If I wasn't already caching the results, yeah, it could've been more worth it, but I feel like my quick and dirty map solution is enough for this very double /latest request problem. Don't you think? What would a library bring me more for this use case?

[SCjona]

there's also https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine (865kb jar lib). I think the benefit is mostly that time based expiration is handled for you and max size so you don't end up using too much memory. Also I personally prefer this builder callback approach in my own code, but that's just my preference.

And you could use that for all your caching pretty much, you just define cache keys and expiration time with these.

[WarningImHack3r]

Alright, this one seems worth giving a shot; I'll play around with it

I won't/can't replace my object caching with that, though. It's just going to be another layer of caching that will happen to solve the /latest duping problem as well

[SCjona]

I won't/can't replace my object caching with that, though

why not?

[WarningImHack3r]

why not?

Because it's meant to cache HTTP responses, not to store all the data I compute in memory into it

I mean, yeah, both share similarities and a very similar underlying structure (HashMap vs ConcurrentHashMap), but I feel like you're not meant to use a cache for this purpose and that you're meant to use it almost exclusively for HTTP stuff. (This might be a dumb naming thing in my head, but I think conceptually they’re two different things.)

I could theoretically use Caffeine for my "persistence" too. However, it’d be different instances than what I use to dedupe requests. At this point, I genuinely see no benefit in rewriting my code to use it over my "homemade maps" other than not manually removing expired entries myself.

[SCjona]

caches are for anything that is slow really. the usual things to cache are:

• the result of an expensive (long running) compute task => trade Disk/RAM for CPU time
• network tasks => trade Disk/RAM for network usage

but yeah your current solution works, there is not much benefit of refactoring except maybe simpler code if you had actually used the LoadingCache callback system