It seems like your real requirement here is to ensure that all messages from a queue are processed by only one consumer. Limiting consumers is one solution to that problem, another more flexible way is message grouping - which guarantees that messages in a specific group always get processed by the same consumer. http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBMESSAGING-375 Message grouping is scheduled for JBM 2.0, There are no plans at present to put this in 1.4.x. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4141267#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...