Yeah I agree with your concerns. I am not a performance expert but as I see it our performance improvement boundary ends when we reach the contents of cache (value object in NodeData attrs map). Unless we force customers to implement some special interfaces there is not much more we can do? So in summary we move forward with Cacheloader API that has only 4 load/store methods: void loadEntireState(ObjectOutputStream os) throws Exception; void storeEntireState(ObjectInputStream is) throws Exception; void loadState(Fqn subtree,ObjectOutputStream os) throws Exception; void storeState(Fqn subtree,ObjectInputStream is) throws Exception; Please hold of any work on all cacheloaders until the end of the week if possible.