"Brian Stansberry in jbosscache-dev" wrote : | Basically, the state transfer semantics imply that the in-memory state | is "consistent" with the cluster when start returns. Either its | "consistent" because it's been transferred, or it's "consistent" because | it's empty and waiting to be populated from a trusted source (shared | cache loader or external source like db). Leaving the in-memory state | around after stop() breaks that. | The reasoning is flawed. If an empty state is considered "consistent" because it can externally be "populated from a trusted source", any state can be considered "consistent" as long as a process can be defined that yields a truly consistent state. For example: Leaving the in-memory state aound after stop() is also consistent: it's waiting to be synchronized "from a trusted source". The definition of "consistent" is either too weak to be useful or does not hold for the start() method. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4068475#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...