It just looks like the time taken to load a lot of stuff from the cache loader. This can be slow if: 1) Connections to your DB are slow (I'm assuming minimal overhead in connection establishment since they're pooled) 2) State in your DB is large In JBoss Cache 2.0.0.BETA1 (which should be released shortly) we have a much faster JDBCCacheLoader implementation. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4024725#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...