"jshowalter" wrote : Based on an earlier thread on this forum that I started, and their response from JBoss (which I think was from you, Manik!) asking how to avoid notification on put, we call setCacheModeLocal(true) for puts of data read from the database as opposed to puts of new data. Will that not accomplish what we want? Also, how would calling putForExternalRead solve the TimeoutException? pFER implicitly sets your timeout to 0 so it won't wait for locks. It it cannot acquire the lock *immediately*, it won't fail either - it will just not do anything. This is OK since the only time it won't be able to get a write lock is if some other thread is doing the same thing (reading form DB and writing to cache) so this is acceptable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4212546#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...