As indicated in one exchange on the Ignite mailing list, local caches are not really treated as first grade citizens, e.g. not tested as extensively, and are being considered for a potential removal in future versions. We currently use local caches for all caches which Alfresco has configured as non-distributed by default. Using local Ignite caches instead of the Alfresco default does hold advantages for our use case, as this allows us to use off-heap caching, reducing our memory footprint. This would be hard / difficult to give up if these caches were removed in future Ignite versions.

We should investigate and prepare for this potential future, by:

• investigating, which Alfresco default caches could be safely turned from local-only to being distributed (i.e. where Alfresco simply choose a too defensive configuration by default)
• investigate which local caches barely ever hold significant amounts of data and could safely be switched to using default Alfresco on-heap caches (i.e. where the benifit of Ignite caches does not warrant using a cache that is not as extensively tested)
• implement any conversions / compatibility bridges required to enable local-only caches to be turned into distributed ones