First thing I would do is take MDBs out of the picture - try creating a vanilla JMS consumer on each node. The MDB layer buffers some messages - ready to send to it's local MDB instances - which will prevent them from being available for other nodes. Secondly, JBM (like pretty much any other messaging system) maintains a comsumer buffer of messages - default is 150 (?). Take a look at the prefetchSize param in the user guide. Also have a search in this forum, there have been several threads on this subject. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4130905#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...