Apologies if I have posted this to the wrong group.
Where I work, till recently we used an old in-house written EJB container. When SFSBeans were passivated, the container serialized the beans and wrote them to the database as a blob. Because the database was on a remote machine accessed via a 16Mbit Token ring, the performance of just moving that data to and from the database was noticable. NB Some of our SFSBeans were a bit large!! (not recommended)
Anyway, we made a simple modification to the passivation mechanism whereby it 'gzip'ped the serialized byte array before sending it over the wire to the db. This made a huge improvement to scalability.
I don't know if JBoss does this already or whether it could make use of this at all.
Regards
it would be useful, although we use the filesystem to store the beans
Check the filepersistencemanager for beans and apply your trick to submit a patch (new class in this case)