bcowdery: First of all excuse my delay to answer you, but I thought that I had already done it. I'm sorry for that ;) . Your explanation is very interesting to me. I'm using Stateless Session Beans in a very "little" environment (compared to a clustered one) so many of the concepts which you mentioned still are a little unfamiliar to me (I'm a rookie yet :P ). However, I'm gonna save a copy of this message for future reference. I'm sure that it will be really useful. The first part of the explanation has solved all my doubts. Basically I'll try to avoid to use that kind of "lazy" operations out of the method which I use to retrieve the desired entity. Indeed I'm already applying that methodology and it's working very well :) . Again, thank you very much for spending your time in helping me ;) . View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4231555#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...