30.4.2. Entity Bean Lifecycle

With the default configuration of JBoss there is only one active instance of a given entity bean in memory at one time. This applies for every cache configuration and every type of commit-option. The lifecycle for this instance is different for every commit-option though.

When a bean is marked for passivation, the bean is placed in a passivation queue. Each entity bean container has a passivation thread that periodically passivates beans that have been placed in the passivation queue. A bean is pulled out of the passivation queue and reused if the application requests access to a bean of the same primary key.

On an exception or transaction rollback, the entity bean instance is thrown out of cache entirely. It is not put into the passivation queue and is not reused by an instance pool. Except for the passivation queue, there is no entity bean instance pooling.