Keeping a single centralized valve per connection gives a single point of bottleneck. All threads invoking into any delegate will have to acquire/release the synchronization element of that valve. This will lead to a lot of contention. Distributing the load across different valve instances will relieve some of this pressure, with no apparent drawback. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3999281#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...