Hi, unfortunately adding memory does not solve the problem. It does not seem to be heap related ... I jstacked after 56 slaves, after 500 adding and removing (also waited for the disconnect messages) slaves and after the next 500 I received the Exception. And the number of threads did not reduce after waiting. I attached the thread dumps. It's the slaveMonitor ... who does not receive an interrupt? public boolean waitOnMonitor(Object monitor) { try { monitor.wait(); } catch (InterruptedException e) { return false; } return true; } Greetings, Ralf