Looks like a possible bug in VFS - it appears that it could be unpacking the war file multiple times while the Digester is parsing the web.xml. Is the serer/xxx/temp directory filling up? Taking some thread dumps while the CPU usage is at 100% might shed some light on what it is doing because it is apparently looping somewhere. Does the same thing happen if you deploy the WAR as an exploded directory? Since this is something that worked in 4.2.x but is broke in 5.0, you might want to post a question in the JossAS5 forum linking back to this topic. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4216353#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...