We're now using Infinispan as a Hibernate L2 cache. There was only one obstacle: locking of our persistent entities.
Formerly we were using EHCache in a single-server configuration only. We switched to Atomikos + Infinispan and got the app working again. So far so good.
Then I ran some load tests. Uh - oh, exceptions all over the place, mostly Infinispan TimeoutExceptions. I'm using the same lock timeout as in the old EHCache version of the system.
In the end this boiled down to long running processing that was in fact causing lock timeouts. This didn't happen in EHCache possibly because it only supports CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_WRITE? I'm not sure; we never pinned down exactly why this arose only after switching to Infinispan.
The app is running very well after sorting through this issue. We've completed load testing and in a single server scenario we get just about exactly the same performance we saw with EHCache.
I wanted to use the Infinispan CacheManager for some app-specific (non-hibernate) caching as well, so I wrote a SpringInfinispanRegionFactory that let me spring-create the CacheManager and wire it to both Hibernate and to my other classes.
The only remaining problem is that we needed a JTA implementation. We went with Atomikos and we aren't happy with it. Bitronix looks good, but doesn't support Infinispan, not even using the last-resource gambit. Jotm is probably OK but the XAPool connection pool that it supports is widely agreed to be awful. Any brilliant suggestions?
