Large clusters (measured in terms of the number of storage-enabled members participating in the largest cache services) may introduce challenges when issuing queries. There is no particular cluster size threshold for this, rather a gradually increasing tendency for issues to arise.

The most obvious challenges are that a client's perceived query latency will be determined by the slowest responder (more likely to be a factor in larger clusters) as well as the fact that adding additional cache servers will not increase query throughput if the query processing is not compute-bound (which would generally be the case for most indexed queries).

If the data set can take advantage of the partition affinity features of Coherence, then the application can use a PartitionedFilter to target a query to a single server (using partition affinity to ensure that all data is in a single partition).

If this can not be done, then avoiding an excessive number of cache server JVMs will help, as will ensuring that each cache server has sufficient CPU resources available and is also properly configured to minimize GC pauses (the most common cause of a slow-responding cache server).