You can definitely configure GridGain as a local cache and take advantage of local transactions, evictions, and expiration policies.
Here is sample spring-based configuration that would do this:
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
<bean id="grid.cfg" class="org.gridgain.grid.GridConfiguration" scope="singleton">
<property name="cacheConfiguration">
<list>
<bean class="org.gridgain.grid.cache.GridCacheConfiguration">
<property name="name" value="myCache"/>
<property name="cacheMode" value="LOCAL"/>
<!-- Eviction policy. -->
<property name="evictionPolicy">
<bean class="org.gridgain.grid.cache.eviction.lru.GridCacheLruEvictionPolicy">
<property name="maxSize" value="10000"/>
</bean>
</property>
</bean>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>
You can start the above configuration as following:
$GRIDGAIN_HOME/bin/ggstart.bat path/to/config/file
As far as performance, the issue was fixed in GridGain 6.0.3. The code above executes in less than 1 second for me.