Owen: (1) What is your deliniation of "put" and "update"? (2) I don't follow how a put could result in a dirty read... Another possibility to consider is an "intention lock" where we temporarily lock a node for the duration of the read/putFromExternalRead cycle. This would guarentee two threads from attempting the same process. This would be instead of #2... So what was the reason for forcing asynch replication? Why not synch? I did not follow where that came in at. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3977561#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...