This is very interesting Adrian. I appreciate the time you have taken to explain all of this to me. However, let me state my problem more concretely so that this discussion doesn't become too theoretical. I am developing a JCA connector to be used against a third-party's system. This system is a game server that plays various well known card games. The system is a legacy system that I have no control over. Whereas the system does support session disconnects/reconnects these are very expensive. The protocol is very chatty and requires you to do things like look up various servers for information, do public key exchange, etc. As such, i feel that doing a re-authentication on every request would be too costly ( I must run some benchmarks of course ). Thats why I can't think of anything better than partitioning the connection pool ByApplication with max/min connections per sub pool being 1. Thanks for the help View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4056568#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...