I think what you propose is the way to go and may not be particularly slower than using the byte arrays. In the end a state transfer of in-memory state involves walking the tree on the side providing the state, and storing persistent state involves executing the cache loader's code for storing each node. The byte arrays just package up the data for efficient transmission over the wire. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3958512#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...