"bstansberry(a)jboss.com" wrote : e) All of the above. The 'independent' lifecycle implemented in AS 4.2 is very much broken. When I was fixing it in AS 5 I saw that multiple chains of SFSBs would emerge because of the whole NestedBeanContext, ProxiedBeanContext and two serializations going on (MarshalledObject and StatefulSessionPersistenceManager). Like you say, it's a bunch of ugle (== unmaintable) code. "bill.burke(a)jboss.com" wrote : For #1 you're talking solely about nested SFSBs sharing the same XPC, right? I did suggest some things for nested SFSBs, specifically, having the parent SFSB manage the bean instance, injecting the bean instance into the child proxy and passing the instance along in the invocation payload, thus bypassing the child's cache. Yes, but I don't like that. It means if the parent is removed the child is removed (or left without an XPC). SFSBs must have independent life cycles (with the exception of passivation maybe). So an XPC must be decoupled from any SFSB. So the XPC must move to an XPCHolder or something. But I get the idea now: an XPC must be serialized together with all it's users in one shot. Note: I suspect a race condition with the passivation thread and ctx.inUse. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4079309#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...