Isn't the idea of state transfer that the recipient has no state in the region being transferred; i.e. it's a complete replace? If so, then for sure there's no need for an exists check. And, if so, then in the passivation case it's the responsibility of the sender to properly segregate the in-memory nodes from the passivated nodes (i.e. it's a bug if it isn't that way already). So, no need to check if a node in the persistent state is in memory before writing it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4155412#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...