User Spider Cache

In System Spider Cache, we described how to build a system cache. If there is no system cache available then Lmod can produce a user based spider cache. It gets written to ~/.cache/lmod. See below for earlier versions of Lmod. It is designed to provide improved speed of performing doing module avail or module spider. But it is not without its problems. The first point is that if Lmod thinks any spider cache is valid, it uses it for the MODULEPATH directories it covers then it uses it instead of walking the tree.

Personal Cache rules:

  1. If it can’t find a valid cache then Lmod walks the tree to find all available modules and builds the spider cache in memory.
  2. If the time it takes to build the cache is longer than the contents of env var. LMOD_SHORT_TIME (default 2 seconds) then Lmod writes the cache file into the ~/.cache/lmod directory.
  3. A user’s cache is assumed to be valid for the contents of LMOD_ANCIENT_TIME (default 86400 seconds or 24 hours) based on the date associated with the cache file.

Sites can change these defaults at configure time. Users can set the environment variables to change their personal setting.

To turn off the generation of a user cache, one can set LMOD_SHORT_TIME to some big number of seconds. For example:

export LMOD_SHORT_TIME=86400

would say that Lmod only write the user cache file if it took longer than 1 day (=86400 seconds). A second way do to this is do make the user cache directory unwritable:

$ rm -rf    ~/.cache/lmod
$ chmod 500 ~/.cache/lmod

NOTE: Lmod versions earlier than 8.7.12 wrote the cache file to ~/.lmod.d/.cache