Context: HSEARCH-1070 JGroups channels need to be shared across multiple backends I think it makes sense for an Hibernate Search instance to share a single JGroups channel across multiple backends; there are several reasons for this: - Not having to change configuration details such as different ports per index - A Channel is expensive (slow) to start - I would very likely want to configure it with a single channel. - Sharing channels doesn't prevent us to have different backends, with different masters on different nodes My question is, should I still make sure we allow for multiple different channels? Like configuring a different protocol stack / network options per index? I'm not liking that as it makes configuration quite complex and tricky - especially worthless as I'm not seeing any practical use for it. There is one (annoying) reason to allow that: backwards compatibility. It seems since version 4.0 we're dealing with it as one channel per index - but this wasn't really intended to work like that imho, I'm considering this a bug rather than an API change, but making it unique across indexes requires a configuration changes: configuration property would not be "scoped" under the index name: < hibernate.search.default.worker.backend.jgroups.configurationString = "jgroups configuration" thoughts? Cheers, Sanne