Q1) A hardware load balancer is always better. The question is - how big of a load to you expect and are you willing to pay the price? Fir small loads, sw load balancers are fine. Q2) You'll find a lot of this in the forum posts, various web location including blogs, and in books specific to the database, OS and JBoss AS. Q3) Various mbeans within JBoss AS provide response time information. This information can be obtained using almost any JMX client, including Jopr, JMeter, and VisualVM. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4253747#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...