I had a chance to poke around a bit. In the Hibernate code the only path I see that results in the entire region for an entity being removed from the cache is via the BulkOperationCleanupAction, which gets clears the cache region during tx commit if the tx executed some "bulk operation". Typically that would be the execution of native SQL whereby Hibernate couldn't track when entity instances were affected by the the SQL, forcing the invalidation of everything all instances of the entity. Is your code doing that? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4206133#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...