Mmm. A few questions. 1) The lock contention occurs on data gravitation only, correct? As we're only updating attributes on nodes, the only time we need to content on lock (the "/" lock, or the buddy backup lock) is when adding something on a cache, ie. on data gravitation? 2) If #1, is there anyway to introduce some kind of fairness, or priority, on the data gravitation? I'm thinking that this setup cannot be fair as gravitating the data shouldn't take more then a few milliseconds and in this test we're only having 50 objects (and threads), and yet threads timeout after 10 seconds. 3) Is there any way to force all data to be gravitated on cache.start()? And if so, would that solve the problem? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4152658#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...