Stream caching

Stream caching

While stream types (like StreamSource, InputStream and Reader) are commonly used in messaging for performance reasons, they also have an important drawback: they can only be read once. In order to be able to work with message content multiple times, the stream needs to be cached.

Streams are caching in memory. In Camel 2.0, large stream messages (over 64 Kb) will be cached in a temporary file instead – Camel itself will handle deleting the temporary file once the cached stream is no longer necessary.

In Camel 2.0 stream cache is default disabled out of the box.
In Camel 1.x stream cache is default enabled out of the box.

Enabling stream caching

In Apache Camel, you can explicitly enable stream caching for a single route with the streamCaching DSL method:

from("jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyService")
    .streamCaching()
    .to("jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyOtherService");

In Spring XML you enable it by setting the streamCache="true" attribute on the route tag.

<route streamCache="true">
   <from uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyService"/>
   <to uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyOtherService"/>
</route>

Scopes

StreamCache supports the global and per route scope. So by setting the streamCache attribute on camelContext you can enable/disable it globally.

<camelContext streamCache="true">
   ...
</camelContext>

The route scope is configured by the streamCache attribute on the <route> tag such as:

<route streamCache="true">
   <from uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyService"/>
   <to uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyOtherService"/>
</route>

You can mix and match for instance you can enable it globally and disable it on a particular route such as:

<camelContext streamCache="true">
  <route>
    <from uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyService"/>
    <to uri="jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyOtherService"/>
  </route>
  
  <route streamCache="false">
    <from uri="jms:queue:foo"/>
    <to uri="jms:queue:bar"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Enabling from Java DSL

In Camel 2.0 you can enable stream cache by setting the property on CamelContext, for instance in a RouteBuilder class:

  context.setStreamCache(true);

  from("jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyService")
     .to("jbi:service:http://foo.bar.org/MyOtherService");

Implicitly enabled for multicast and dead letter channel (Camel 1.x)

Some EIPs require that the message content can be read multiple times. Stream caching will be automatically enabled when using these EIPs in your routes:

• Multicast will implicitly cache streams to ensure that all the endpoints can access the message content
• Dead Letter Channel uses stream caching to ensure that the message content can actually be read again when redelivering a message

Streaming cache to files

When stream cache is enabled it will by default spool big streams to files instead of keeping them in memory. The default threshold is 64kb but you can configure it with the following properties:

You set these properties on the CamelContext as shown below:

context.getProperties().put(CachedOutputStream.TEMP_DIR, "/tmp/cachedir");
context.getProperties().put(CachedOutputStream.THRESHOLD, "1024");
context.getProperties().put(CachedOutputStream.BUFFER_SIZE, "4096");

Disabling spooling to disk

Available as of *Camel 1.6.2/2.0
You can disable spooling to disk by setting a threshold of 0 or a negative value.

// disable spooling to disk
context.getProperties().put(CachedOutputStream.THRESHOLD, "0");

How it works?

In order to determine if a type requires caching, we leverage the type converter feature. Any type that requires stream caching can be converted into an org.apache.camel.StreamCache instance.