I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner--I had registered to watch this topic for replies, but never got a notification! It's not clear that we can use a different read mode here, because the cache is being written to due to a cache fault--a reader got a null, so the reader fetches from the database and does the put. Meanwhile all other readers should block, because if they don't and are allowed to read, they'll read nulls as well, and also fetch from the database, and also attempt to put, and I'll wind up with multiple writers getting in each others' way. The puzzling thing is that the put to the cache should be virtually instantaneous, so I don't see where the 15+ second delay is coming from. It's true that the system is under load, but it's not under tremendous load. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4211967#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...