This is by design. Eviction information is only about nodes which are in memory at any given time, so the eviction thread knows what can be evicted, or more specifically, the order in which to evict things. This information is meaningless in a cache loader, or even when freshly loaded on startup. The eviction algorithm should monitor usage patterns after startup and then evict accordingly. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4102508#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...