Without knowing the architecture of your application it's a little hard to provide guesses as to what the bottleneck could be. It could, for example, be network roundtrips if you are making very large numbers of fast database requests to a remote database machine. It could be thread synchronization bottlenecks, etc. A useful rough profiling technique is to get a dump of what all the threads in your application are doing: see http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=StackTrace (and follow the "jmx-console" link if you are using recent JBoss). By examining the stack trace, you should be able to see what your application threads are doing most of the time. It's possible as well that you just need to increase parallelism ... for example, if you have only one thread handling requests, then you wouldn't expect to be able to get more than about 70% cpu usage (the other 30% of the time is spent waiting for the database, etc.) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3989785#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...