If you have a distributed queue with an MDB consuming from that queue - one on each node, and send messages to that queue on a particular node, then the local consumer (i.e. the local MDB) will always get the messages by preference. This makes sense, since there's no point sending the messages to different nodes if the local consumer can cope with them happily - this would just be unnecessary network traffic. Consumers on other nodes will consume the messages only if the local consumer either doesn't exist, or is "busy". What does "busy" mean? Each consumer maintains a local buffer of messages (default size 150) from which it consumes. Once that buffer is full, the consumer is busy. For a fast consumer, the buffer would never get full so it would never be busy. You can alter this value (see prefetchSize in the doco). Also make sure you're using 1.4.0.SP3 and JBoss Remoting 2.2.2.SP4 Hope that clears things up. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4113909#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...