I'm starting this thread because I have been bothered for awhile about this instance pool. In two situations (both of which I cannot reference publicly, but anyone wants to have a private conversation I can explain), where we switched from the ThreadLocalPool to StrictMaxPool throughput of a large scale test improved. On the surface it appears that using a ThreadLocal is just adding overhead, and not providing any real benefit. In looking at the code, it appears we don't get any of the benefits of using a ThreadLocal, where you shouldn't need any synchronization, and are just adding overhead with the get calls to access the pool. This seems like the wrong use case for using ThreadLocal to me. Thoughts? View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4256258#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...