Just a thought, a hash bucket approach (that I suggested to Hibernate some while back) to reduce contention on a parent node may help here as well. This may be encapsulated into an 'InternalNode' or wired manually in PojoCache code (for now, maybe). The basic idea is that when you need to create /_JBossInternal_/Node1 /_JBossInternal_/Node2 /_JBossInternal_/Node10 /_JBossInternal_/Node11 you actually create: /_JBossInternal_/Bucket0-9/Node1 /_JBossInternal_/Bucket0-9/Node2 /_JBossInternal_/Bucket10-19/Node10 /_JBossInternal_/Bucket10-19/Node11 which will reduce the contention on _JBossInternal_ as a direct parent. Perhaps this is behaviour we could add (in the 3.0 timeframe?) to JBoss Cache's core Node impls, so all user data gets to benefit from this as well? Cheers, Manik View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3999478#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...