Memcached – JavaScript localStorage cache with size limit and least-recently used (LRU) eviction

This cannot be implemented perfectly, because there are no guarantees about how browsers store the content of the local storage but a close-enough implementation can be created.

We can start from the fact that a string in JS is a 16-bit unsigned integer value (because everything is stored as string in the localStorage). This means we can easily get the size of any string in bytes with content.length * 16 / 8.

So now we only need to create a cache which tracks the size of the stored content and the size of the keys, it stores the content under.

A very primitive and naive implementation could be:

class Cache {

  private keyStoreKey: string;
  private cacheSizeKey: string;

  /**
   * List of the keys stored in this cache.
   */
  private storedKeys: string[] = [];

  /**
   * The size of the stored values in bytes
   */
  private cacheSize: number = 0;

  constructor(
    private prefix: string, 
    private sizeLimit: number,
  ) {
    if(this.sizeLimit < 100) {
      // the minimal size of the cache is 24 + prefix, otherwise, it would enter 
      // a loop trying to remove every element on any insert operation.
      throw new Error('Cache size must be above 100 bytes');
    }

    this.keyStoreKey = `${prefix}:k`;
    this.cacheSizeKey = `${prefix}:s`;

    this.cacheSize = localStorage.getItem(this.cacheSizeKey) ? Number.parseInt(localStorage.getItem(this.cacheSizeKey)) : 0;
    this.storedKeys = localStorage.getItem(this.keyStoreKey) ? localStorage.getItem(this.keyStoreKey).split(',') : [];
  }

  /**
   * The size of the keys in bytes
   */
  public get keyStoreSize() {
    return this.calculateLenght(this.storedKeys.join(`${this.prefix}:v:,`));
  }

  public get totalUsedSize() {
    return this.cacheSize + this.keyStoreSize + this.calculateLenght(this.keyStoreKey) + this.calculateLenght(this.cacheSizeKey);
  }

  /**
   * Returns the size of the given string in bytes.
   * 
   * The ECMAScript specification defines character as single 16-bit unit of UTF-16 text
   */
  private calculateLenght(content: string): number {
    return content.length * 16 / 8;
  }

  /**
   * Saves an item into the cahce.
   * 
   * NOTE: name cannot contain commas.
   */
  public set(name: string, content: string) {
    const newContentSize = this.calculateLenght(content);

    if(!(this.storedKeys).some(storedName => storedName === name)) {
      this.storedKeys.unshift(name);

      this.cacheSize += newContentSize;
    } else {
      this.storedKeys = this.storedKeys.filter(n => n !== name);
      this.storedKeys.unshift(name);      

      const oldContentSize = this.calculateLenght(localStorage.getItem(`${this.prefix}:v:${name}`));

      this.cacheSize = this.cacheSize - oldContentSize + newContentSize;
    }

    while(this.totalUsedSize > this.sizeLimit && this.storedKeys.length > 0) {
      this.removeOldestItem();
    }

    localStorage.setItem(this.cacheSizeKey, this.cacheSize.toString());  
    localStorage.setItem(`${this.prefix}:debug:totalSize`, this.totalUsedSize.toString());  
    localStorage.setItem(this.keyStoreKey, this.storedKeys.join(','));
    localStorage.setItem(`${this.prefix}:v:${name}`, content);
  }

  /**
   * The oldest item is the last in the stored keys array
   */
  private removeOldestItem() {
    const name = this.storedKeys.pop();
    const oldContentSize = this.calculateLenght(localStorage.getItem(`${this.prefix}:v:${name}`));

    this.cacheSize -= oldContentSize;

    localStorage.removeItem(`${this.prefix}:v:${name}`);
  }
}

window['cache'] = new Cache('test', 200);

I haven’t implemented the functions for reading data, but because the keys are stored in an array you can easily implement a getMostRecent() or getNthRecent(position) or just a simple get(key) function.

The implementation is in Typescript if you are not familiar with it just ignore the unknown parts.