Is this usage of a cache map safe in a multithreaded environment?

Question

I'm implementing a LRU cache for photos of users, using Commons Collections LRUMap (which is basicly a LinkedHashMap with small modifications). The findPhoto method can be called several hundred times within a few seconds.

public class CacheHandler {
    private static final int MAX_ENTRIES = 1000;
    private static Map<Long, Photo> photoCache = Collections.synchronizedMap(new LRUMap(MAX_ENTRIES));

    public static Map<Long, Photo> getPhotoCache() {
        return photoCache;
    }
}

Usage:

public Photo findPhoto(Long userId){
    User user = userDAO.find(userId);
    if (user != null) {
        Map<Long, Photo> cache = CacheHandler.getPhotoCache();

        Photo photo = cache.get(userId);
        if(photo == null){
            if (user.isFromAD()) {
                try {
                    photo = LDAPService.getInstance().getPhoto(user.getLogin());
                } catch (LDAPSearchException e) {
                    throw new EJBException(e);
                }
            } else {
                log.debug("Fetching photo from DB for external user: " + user.getLogin());
                UserFile file = userDAO.findUserFile(user.getPhotoId());
                if (file != null) {
                    photo = new Photo(file.getFilename(), "image/png", file.getFileData());
                }
            }
            cache.put(userId, photo);
        }else{
            log.debug("Fetching photo from cache, user: " + user.getLogin());
        }
        return photo;

    }else{
        return null;
    }
}

As you can see I'm not using synchronization blocks. I'm assuming that the worst case scenario here is a race condition that causes two threads to run cache.put(userId, photo) for the same userId. But the data will be the same for two threads, so that is not an issue.

Is my reasoning here correct? If not, is there a way to use a synchronization block without getting a large performance hit? Having only 1 thread accessing the map at a time feels like overkill.

Answer 1

Yes you are right - if the photo creation is idempotent (always returns the same photo), the worst thing that can happen is that you will fetch it more than once and put it into the map more than once.