spreading your stuff across the tree structure will help. The node structure is maintained using a CHM per Node to hold references to its children. And these CHMs are tuned for a lower-than-normal memory footprint so this means having lots of children per node will hurt concurrency. I'd recommend not putting more than 50 children per node and going as deep as you have to. Also, re: your state retrieval, 20000 is pretty low (20 seconds) and if you have a lot of state, there is no way you will be able to transfer all that in 20 secs! :-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4166041#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...