some thoughts on data gravitation. As the session affinity is not enforced (this means that affinity might vary from total randomness to a certain degree) the following optimization might be performed: - if the call is made on a node that is not part of the partition, then rather tunnel the call to one of the nodes in the partition(determine it based on replicated meta data) than to add the node to the partition. This would be more efficient. When a certain threshold of hits on that out-of-partition node is reached (this means that there is a degree of affinity) - only then to add the node to the partition. The above optimization relies on tunneling calls being (much?) efficient than replicating entire state of a subtree into an node( this also includes operation like flush to prevent changes to the cache, which might be quite expensive) Also the join-partition logic might be made more smarter, to be aware of things like subtree size, hits to other nodes etc - more flexibility View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4076250#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...