Just showing a colleague and realised that setting the listener to null on the consumer does make a difference. If you do this, only 40 threads get created. If I then pause the above sample, the threads get cleaned up, so I assume there is some sort of thread pooling and cleanup going on. Will have to check out our app server again, but we had over 1,400 threads most of which were message listeners. BTW - we were seeing this behaviour in 1.0.1 CR2, so I might try CR3 next week. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3961502#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...