i can see two possible issues, first if I start 20 standalone clients (each with one connection), they will all create connections to the same node, rather than round robin to multiple nodes, if the node fails, all 20 would try to fail over at the same time. The second issue has to do with a known problem, http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBMESSAGING-972. I find, under load, I end up with a non-zero message count on one node with a consumer count of zero on the same node. These messages sit on the queue indefinitely, unless I start a client locally using ConnectionFactory which creates a connection to the same node. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4056221#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...