Hi, in what situations is the state (ATM just version + cache topologies) meant to be persisted? I guess it's necessary with non-shared cache stores, but should it be persisted with shared one, too? And what are the guarantees during writing that state down? (e.g. can you make sure that no operations are executed when persisting?) My problem is that for scattered cache, I need to persist highest version for each segment, or I have to iterate through cache store when starting - that's kind of forced preload. It's even worse - during regular preload, cache topology is not installed yet, and as I've found, I can't do that in @Start annotated method because I need to find segment for each key and cache topology can be installed even later than in STMI.start() (when the persistent state is being loaded, the response to join may not contain the cache topology). Radim -- Radim Vansa <rvansa(a)redhat.com&gt; JBoss Performance Team