Overview of EJB Pooling and Caching

Both stateless session beans and entity beans can be pooled to improve server performance. In addition, both stateful session beans and entity beans can be cached to improve performance.

The difference between a pooled bean and a cached bean is that pooled beans are all equivalent and indistinguishable from one another. Cached beans, on the contrary, contain conversational state in the case of stateful session beans, and are associated with a primary key in the case of entity beans. Entity beans are removed from the pool and added to the cache on ejbActivate() and removed from the cache and added to the pool on ejbPassivate(). ejbActivate() is called by the container when a needed entity bean is not in the cache. ejbPassivate() is called by the container when the cache grows beyond its configured limits.

If you develop and deploy your EJB components using Sun Java Studio, then you need to edit the individual bean descriptor settings for bean pool and bean cache. These settings might not be suitable for production-level deployment.