Guava Cache: How to access without it counting for the eviction policy?

Question

I have a Guava cache which I would like to expire after X minutes have passed from the last access on a key. However, I also periodically do an action on all the current key-vals (much more frequently than the X minutes), and I wouldn't like this to count as an access to the key-value pair, because then the keys will never expire.

Is there some way to read the value of the keys without this influencing the internal state of the cache? ie cache._secretvalues.get(key) where I could conceivably subclass Cache to StealthCache and do getStealth(key)? I know relying on internal stuff is non-ideal, just wondering if it's possible at all. I think when I do cache.asMap.get() it still counts as an access internally.

Answer 1

From the official Guava tutorials:

Access time is reset by all cache read and write operations (including Cache.asMap().get(Object) and Cache.asMap().put(K, V)), but not by containsKey(Object), nor by operations on the collection-views of Cache.asMap(). So, for example, iterating through cache.entrySet() does not reset access time for the entries you retrieve.

So, what I would have to do is iterate through the entrySet instead to do my stealth operations.