Hi,

I don't want to criticize WildFly. I think WildFly is the best Application server we have ever seen. But I want to discuss the topic of Session Bean Pooling. I know that there was a discussion in the past to disable pooling of EJB Session Beans per default in WildFly.
I understand when you argue that pooling a session bean is not faster than creating the bean from scratch each time a method is called. From the perspective of a application server developer this is a clear and easy decision. But from the view of an application developer this breaks one of the main concepts of session beans - the pooling.
As a application developer I suppose my bean is pooled and I can use one of the life-cycle annotations to control my bean. This is a basic concept for all kind of beans. First I thought it could be a compromise to pool only these beans which have a life-cycle annotation. But this isn't a solution.
Knowing that my bean will be pooled allows me - as a component developer - to use this as a caching mechanism. For example time intensive routines can also cache results in a local variable to be used next time a method is called. This isn't a bad practice and can increase performance of my component depending on the pool settings.

So my suggestion is to pool also stateless session ejbs in the future. I guess form the specification there is no duty to pool beans. So there is nothing wrong when not pooling beans. And again I don't want to criticize. But at the end not pooling will decrease the performance of WildFly. Not the container itself but the applications running in WildFly.
It takes me a long time to figure out why my application was a little bit slower in WildFly than in GlassFish until I recognized the missing pooling. I can activate pooling and everything is cool. But I guess some other application developers will only see that there application is slower in WildFly than on other application servers.
And this will effect their decision. That is the argument to activate the pool per default.