According to the docs, your expectation is correct in that setting time to live to 0 means that there is no time to live. And hence the JIRA to enhance this such that we are able to specify a ttl of 0 such that elements are evicted pretty much immediately. I suspect that the reason you see your nodes being removed so quickly has to do with something else. Have you got log messages showing that elements are being evicted almost as soon as they are put into the cache? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4158487#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...