I got a question for you. I get an object back from hibernate, call the getters that populate Sets that are mapped by hibernate, then close the session and I DO NOT DETACH anything from the session but its closed anyway. So when I go back to call these getters that were populated by hibernate they should still be there because they were loaded already right? Well I store this cached version in a web session and over time it seems to forget or loose the data that was once gotten by the session because it starts throwing lazy loading exceptions like it was trying to get the data again? Is there a caching mechanism that clears the cache removing my objects or a recheck after so many minutes timer that hibernate has? Or can the close session on garbage collection collect all the objects it once loaded for me?