About Distributed Configurations
The BigMemory Max configuration file (ehcache.xml by default) contains the configuration for one instance of a CacheManager (the Ehcache class managing a set of defined caches). This configuration file must be in your application's classpath to be found. When using a WAR file, ehcache.xml should be copied to WEB-INF/classes.
Note the following about ehcache.xml in a Terracotta cluster:
The copy on disk is loaded into memory from the first Terracotta client (also called application server or node) to join the cluster.
Once loaded, the configuration is persisted in memory by the Terracotta servers in the cluster and survives client restarts.
In-memory configuration can be edited in the Terracotta Management Console (TMC). Changes take effect immediately but are
not written to the original on-disk copy of ehcache.xml.
The in-memory cache configuration is removed with server restarts if the servers are not in persistent mode (
<restartable enabled="false">), which is the default. The original (on-disk) ehcache.xml is loaded.
The in-memory cache configuration survives server restarts if the servers are in persistent mode (
<restartable enabled="true">). If you are using the Terracotta servers with persistence of shared data, and you want the cluster to load the original (on-disk) ehcache.xml, the servers' database must be wiped by removing the data files from the servers'
server-data directory. This directory is specified in the Terracotta configuration file in effect (tc-config.xml by default). Wiping the database causes
all persisted shared data to be lost.
A minimal distributed-cache configuration should have the following configured:
A Clustering element in individual cache configurations. See
terracotta.