Perhaps the eviction thread is not running frequently enough? The maxNodes config is not a hard limit, i.e. the cache doesn't use the thread trying to insert node 30,001 to evict a node first in order to stay under the limit. There's a separate eviction thread (runs every 5 secs by default) that does it. That said 97,000 versus a limit of 30,000 is a big difference. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4224105#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...