Some further hints from the Infinispan documentation: https://docs.jboss.org/infinispan/14.0/apidocs/org/infinispan/notifications/cachelistener/annotation/CacheEntryRemoved.html: " Locking: notification is performed WITH locks on the given key. ". I remember reading somewhere also that it is not advised to acquire further locks but couldn't find this again. This is the evidence I have that we were doing something wrong that could have caused issues which might be fixed now.