Hm, the forum system ate my reply, I'll try to write it again. In my case, with both locking schemes, both nodes usually fail at the same time (but not always). I don't necessarily want a specific type of locks (e.g. distributed), especially if they're "extremely non-scalable". Indeed, this situation is rare, and if you think a retry is the solution here then I can accept it. However, I would expect the cache to handle it transparently (and in a configurable way); failure is not acceptable. Also, this is not about storing a heavily updated value. Say we have to make some changes in the cache based on some external real-time events (from a data feed), and we have 2 replicated caches, for failover. Both caches should listen to the events and perform the same changes immediately (which basically means at the same time). This ensures that no data can be lost if one cache dies, but it also triggers the problem I found. How can this be handled? Thanks Adrian View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4118040#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...