It is assumed that caching is only of interest to small deployments. Although caching is bad for scalability it is excellent for a small number of users/objects as there is less need for passivation/activation. In a large deployment, you will certainly get improved performance by disabling caching in each container and simply running more containers. That is, get the database to do the caching; that's what you are paying them the big bucks for anyway. Replication is a much more scalable option compared to caching entity beans in the Container.