Yeah Singleton has a loaded meaning and we should probably not use it jbm terms because it's confused with the jboss terms. If we didn't have partial queue on each machine, what would be the alternative for load balancing messages in a queue. Would we(I'm just throwing out some thoughts)... 1. Only allow one(it an it's buddy) node on the cluster to hold the actual queue(I think this is what Clebert was talking about). Then when a consumer hits a node in the cluster, it's directed to the one that has the actual queue on it. This would allow a consumer to go to anynode in the cluster and ask for a queue, where by it would be redirected to the machine that has the real queue, but the actual queue would be on one node. 2. Drop load balancing support all together for queues and make consumers go to the machine that the queue is on(either that or it's backup node). So the clients would have to have some knowledge of what queues are on what boxes in the cluster. 3. Replicate the entire queue to one or more buddies. Performance would go down, but uses could choose to have the queue completely replicated on each node. We spoke about making the number of buddies in the cluster configurable, so you could choose, just one for failover or multiple. In this same paradigm users could choose which nodes in the cluster will have the queue. I do think that the idea of pulling messages around the ring of nodes was a little confusing to users(especially when they start using selectors), but I do think that the ability to be able to load balance consumers on different boxes, doing local access(without having to hop to a different cluster member) is a definite need. So I'd start off with what I would believe the requirements to be from a customer stand point. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4170814#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...