I was just using "fail-fast" as a shorthand for the whole set of behaviors that are used now: - Lock temporarily, not part of the current transaction - Time out immediately on lock failure - Don't throw an exception on lock failure I'm not sure I buy that these are all really independent, especially when have additional special lock handling as discussed here. But I didn't mean to imply that putFailFast was actually used. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3972924#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...