Websphere Commerce Data Cache

• The WebSphere Commerce data cache can be configured to use DistributedMap object caches, by defining specially named.object caches in the cacheinstances.properties file.
•  Object caching in specified DistributedMap instances causes each type of data to be cached in its corresponding DistributedMap object.
• Takes precedence over the dynamic caching configuration specified in cachespec.xml - the configurations are no longer read from the cachespec.xml for the objects cached using the object caches - hence priority, timeout, or inactivity settings cannot be fine-tuned using cachespec.xml and need to be defined using various DistributedMap attributes in the cacheinstances.properties file.
• Can be configured in two ways :
• Define DistributedMap objects with the default JNDI names in the cacheinstances.properties file
• Use the WebSphere Application Server Integrated Solutions Console. From the left menu, click Resources > Cache instances > Object cache instance

•  The DistributedMap cache objects cannot be viewed in Dynamic Cache Monitor which comes packaged with WAS. The Extended Dynamic Cache Monitor need to be installed. The steps and download can be found in the here

Related Reading:
 IBM WCS 7.0 Infocenter