I have an app which must execute about 200,000 process instances per day inside an EE container. I was unable to use JBPM persistence as it resulted in too many DB deadlocks, especially when trying to delete completed process instances. Run a dump of all the SQL that is executed when you create/signal/manipulate vars/delete a process instance and you will quickly see why this did not work for me. It really was not designed to be used how I had hoped to use it. I replaced the JBPM persistence model with my own simple, flat model, persisting the process instance as an EJB3 @Lob in a single table. This has reduced my DB load to almost nothing and works well. This solution may not meet your requirements, as it does not really handle concurrent updates to a single process instance, but then again, I did not have that requirement. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4146331#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...