You can roughly assume one node per entity. There are some overhead nodes as well, but that's unlikely to be significant in the overall node count once you start talking thousands of entities. Yes, increasing maxNodes to 10,000 will increase the number of hibernate objects. Whether you have enough memory to hold that many depends on how much memory you give your VM and how much data is in your entities. You have to try and find out. People certainly cache much larger numbers of entities than that; there's nothing magic about 5,000, it's just an example value. Passivation is not recommended. Hibernate second level caching has never been tested with passivation because generally it makes no sense to use something else as a persistent store for something that's already in a production level RDBMS. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4221665#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...