Running multiple JVM's that ts.write to a single TupleSpace. Something is causing it to take several minutes. Tuple is small, under 50 bytes. JVM's seem to be in lock sync. That is timestamps before and after a { ts = new TupleSpace .. tuple = new Tuple .. ts.write(tuple) } show ending time stamps with in a few milliseconds of each other. JVM that retrieves the tuples does a ts.take, and got a tuple before any of the timestamps that show the problem, and was still doing what it wanted to do when the writes finished.