I was able to skip this useless processing of cascades, by clearing the session (entitymanager.clear()) before returning. Using trace logging, i found out that the 9 seconds were all used to handle about 400 entities. Hibernate, i think you got a little problem here. Note: with trace logging enabled it took over 2 minutes. 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.transaction.CacheSynchronization] transaction before completion callback 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.jdbc.JDBCContext] before transaction completion 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl] before transaction completion 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.ejb.AbstractEntityManagerImpl] automatically flushing session 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl] automatically flushing session 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 TRACE [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] flushing session 2006-09-26 13:01:10,410 DEBUG [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] processing flush-time cascades ... 2006-09-26 13:03:49,101 TRACE [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] Processing unreferenced collections 2006-09-26 13:03:49,101 TRACE [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] Scheduling collection removes/(re)creates/updates 2006-09-26 13:03:49,101 DEBUG [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] Flushed: 0 insertions, 0 updates, 0 deletions to 418 objects 2006-09-26 13:03:49,101 DEBUG [org.hibernate.event.def.AbstractFlushingEventListener] Flushed: 0 (re)creations, 0 updates, 0 removals to 417 collections 2006-09-26 13:03:49,101 DEBUG [org.hibernate.pretty.Printer] listing entities: View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3974187#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...