Beware of accumulating expired Octane cached items

When using swoole tables as Octane cache in Laravel, be aware that the expired cached items are never really deleted. 

The get method of the cache ignores the expired items but they are never flushed if you don't explicitly delete them. 

To avoid the Swoole Cache table to grow ad aeternum you must do some cleanup from time to time.

Define a new class that will do the clean up every minute using the Tick functionality of the Swoole extension. 

<?php

namespace xxxxxx;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Log;

use Laravel\Octane\Facades\Octane;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\App;

class CacheHouseKeeping {

public static function clean () {

  $table=App::make('octane.cacheTable');

    $i=$deleted=0;

    Log::info("** Current date=".date('Y-m-d H:i:s')." expiring old cached items");

    foreach ($table as $key => $record) {

    if ($record['expiration']<time()) {

Log::debug("EXPIRING key=$key value=".$record['value'].' expiration='.date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $record['expiration']));

        $table->del($key);

        $deleted++;

      }

      $i++;

    }

    Log::info("** Total keys scanned $i, deleted=$deleted remaining=".($i-$deleted)." finished ".date('Y-m-d H:i:s'));

  }

public static function boot() {

  Octane::tick('cache-housekeeping-ticker', fn () => self::getAndReport())

    ->seconds(60);

  }

}

And in the file app/Providers/RouteServiceProvider.php call the boot method of the class in order to set the Ticker. 

... 

CacheHouseKeeping::boot(); 

... 

Then, every minute the clean function will be executed and will clean all the expired items in the cache.

The main lines works as follows: 

1. Get the cache Swoole table from the application service container (the App Facade).

$table=App::make('octane.cacheTable'); 

2. Loop through all the items in the swoole cache table records

foreach ($table as $key => $record) { 

3. Check the expiration date 

if ($record['expiration']<time()) {

4. Delete the expired key 

$table->del($key); 

Hope this help you to keep the Octane Swoole Cache under control.