B: size of the buffer
K: number of items having distinct access probabilities
LRU eviction: O(KB)
FIFO eviction: O(K)
Unless it costs a lot more to load an object into the cache, FIFO eviction may make the most sense. In most LRU implementations I’ve written, the cost to maintain the “use” status of the cached object was more expensive than a cache miss because of the object had been evicted. Consider the cost of loading the object versus the SLA for the service. Also, if the cache objects retrieved tend to be clustered very strongly with few if any changes, the cached objects won’t be evicted from the cache very often. A FIFO strategy only loses in the case of a full cache where rarely used objects are occasionally inserted and frequently used objects are evicted and reloaded.
The JVM garbage collector is generally less efficient with larger heap sizes. Heaps over 1 GB with efficient garbage collection is possible if the JVM is properly tuned. Concurrent Mark and Sweep collector may be buggy in very large heaps–tiny JDK 6+ JVMs in federation worked okay. Cache growth should be limited (especially with hashmap caches). The number of long living objects is a problem moreso than the size of those objects, so consider serializing/deserializing the objects to byte arrays (the JVM is optimized around short-lived object garbage collection and the cost of young generation garbage collection is proportionally lower than older generation garbage collection).
and a 
USB microphone and audio adapter. The cooler is for obvious reasons, and this one reviewed well. The USB audio is because on my last Cardinal laptop, a Dell, the solder on the audio card and audio jack was defective which caused the audio to fail. Since I only plan on using headphones and a microphone when playing in a different room from Becky, I’ll plug the audio adapter into a USB hub (a poor man’s docking station) and use it that way.
I strongly considered PHP but decided against it in the end. Ruby was also considered but I didn’t want to learn a new language while coding a new app. I toyed with using Lua. In the end, I decided on Python 2.4 so I don’t have to do any gymnastics at Dreamhost. As far as my scripts are concerned, it’s a one-line change between platforms:
