Interesting. You mentioned that only the CMS cache actually caches queries. Is most of the actual caching activity in the CMS cache? Also, if you aren't actually caching queries, you should set use_query_cache to false in your SessionFactory config. Otherwise every time you create a new entity or update one, Hibernate will send a *two* messages around the cluster to invalidate the query cache. That message should go async, but it's still a source of overhead. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4165939#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...