I've just noticed that marshalling of nodes for transferring state in HEAD is hand-wired. We should do this thru the VersionAwareMarshaller framework we have in place for other comms as well as marshalling to cache loaders, to benefit from the data streams being version-aware as well as being more efficient by making use of magic numbers instead of class headers + using JBoss Serialization where useful. I've created a JIRA task for this, Vlad, perhaps you could do this alongside the SST stuff you've got in HEAD? http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBCACHE-908 Cheers, -- Manik Surtani Lead, JBoss Cache JBoss, a division of Red Hat Email: manik(a)jboss.org Telephone: +44 7786 702 706 MSN: manik(a)surtani.org Yahoo/AIM/Skype: maniksurtani