Don't take this answer as meaning anything beyond what I literally say, (particularly re: any particular approach) as I'm posting quickly and am not going to be careful about wording. :) Thinking about separating concerns and designing to make it easy to do that is a good thing IMHO. E.g. eviction now involves 1) cache providing information about cache events that can be used to make decisions. 2) deciding if I need to evict 3) deciding what to evict 4) mechanics of evicting 5) a background thread spawned by the cache to handle 2-4. To the extent the current eviction subsystem makes it difficult to use those features a la carte, it would be good in theory to make it easier. For the EJB3 SFSB caching case I could foresee only wanting JBC support for 1,2,3. There's already a slightly custom implementation of 4, implemented in a not very clean way. I'd also somewhat like to get rid of #5 and have the EJB container use its own thread. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4065217#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...