At the moment, when using the non-managed connection factory in the JDBC cache loader, a new connection is created for every operation and in high-concurrency environments this can exhaust the db connections. Should we be using a pooling library like Apache's DBCP[1] for this? Probably increase efficiency a great deal. A user attempting to improve throughput hacked in an open connection and stored it in thread-local and saw some really big improvements[2]. His hack is not a solution since it breaks when using transactions, but highlights the need for a conn pool for people who use this cache loader outside of an app server. [1] http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/dbcp/ [2] http://www.jboss.com/index.html? module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3977895#3977895 What do people think? -- 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