How should I implement Guava cache when I plan to cache multiple values efficiently?

I have a Java class that has a Guava LoadingCache<String, Integer> and in that cache, I'm planning to store two things: the average time active employees have worked for the day and their efficiency. I am caching these values because it would be expensive to compute every time a request comes in. Also, the contents of the cache will be refreshed (refreshAfterWrite) every minute.

I was thinking of using a CacheLoader for this situation, however, its load method only loads one value per key. In my CacheLoader, I was planning to do something like:

private Service service = new Service();

public Integer load(String key) throws Exception {
    if (key.equals("employeeAvg"))
        return calculateEmployeeAvg(service.getAllEmployees());

    if (key.equals("employeeEff"))
        return calculateEmployeeEff(service.getAllEmployees());

    return -1;
}

For me, I find this very inefficient since in order to load both values, I have to invoke service.getAllEmployees() twice because, correct me if I'm wrong, CacheLoader's should be stateless.

Which made me think to use the LoadingCache.put(key, value) method so I can just create a utility method that invokes service.getAllEmployees() once and calculate the values on the fly. However, if I do use LoadingCache.put(), I won't have the refreshAfterWrite feature since it's dependent on a cache loader.

How do I make this more efficient?

Solution

It seems like your problem stems from using strings to represent value types (Effective Java Item 50). Instead, consider defining a proper value type that stores this data, and use a memoizing Supplier to avoid recomputing them.

public static class EmployeeStatistics {
  private final int average;
  private final int efficiency;
  // constructor, getters and setters
}

Supplier<EmployeeStatistics> statistics = Suppliers.memoize(
    new Supplier<EmployeeStatistics>() {
  @Override
  public EmployeeStatistics get() {
    List<Employee> employees = new Service().getAllEmployees();
    return new EmployeeStatistics(
        calculateEmployeeAvg(employees),
        calculateEmployeeEff(employees));
  }});

You could even move these calculation methods inside EmployeeStatistics and simply pass in all employees to the constructor and let it compute the appropriate data.

If you need to configure your caching behavior more than Suppliers.memoize() or Suppliers.memoizeWithExpiration() can provide, consider this similar pattern, which hides the fact that you're using a Cache inside a Supplier:

Supplier<EmployeeStatistics> statistics = new Supplier<EmployeeStatistics>() {
  private final Object key = new Object();
  private final LoadingCache<Object, EmployeeStatistics> cache =
      CacheBuilder.newBuilder()
        // configure your builder
        .build(
           new CacheLoader<Object, EmployeeStatistics>() {
             public EmployeeStatistics load(Object key) {
               // same behavior as the Supplier above
             }});

  @Override
  public EmployeeStatistics get() {
    return cache.get(key);
  }};