When a deployment, such as an .ear file, is a symlink and the jboss.vfs.forceCanonical property is set to "true" to address JBVFS-137, the deployment fails to be properly cached leading to an ever increasing vfs-nested.tmp directory.

JBVFS-137 addresses the problem that permanentRoots in the VFSCache get set according to their canonical path by the URL PropertyEditor. Without the fix, if the deployment directory is a symlink, it will be stored in the cache using a different path than lookups will use. To correct this, when checking for items in the cache, the canonical path must be used, or else there will not be a match. Setting the jboss.vfs.forceCanonical property enables conversion of the deployment's path to a canonical path for this purpose.

However, in the case of a deployment that is a symbolic link within the deploy directory (i.e., someApp.ear is itself a symbolic link), there is no initial modification of the path to a canonical path. (Because the URL is not being set via a PropertyEditor.) So, it is stored based on the non-canonical path. But, with jboss.vfs.forceCanonical set to true, the lookup is based on the canonical path, which doesn't match.