Indeed when you want to remove the laziness in hibernate you have two options: 1) change the mapping files to remove lazy retrieval 2) make queries where you perform non lazy joining etc... The second approach is more preferable IMO since you may want to perform lazy querying for some queries and non-lazy for others. So the solution you provided is indeed similar to the thing we came up (doing fetch joins) at this point. This gives better performance, however I still need to investigate the querying a bit further because there are still too much SQL queries passing by. We also played around with batch fetching and subselect fetching. Just a question: how many sql queries are done when you retrieve the list of 1500 task instances? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4033916#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...