Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE™ Technology Study Guide

2.11. Passivation of EJB

Passivation is the process of writing the bean's state to a file on the file system, so the instance of the bean can be used by another session. You use passivation to handle more requests with fewer resources. This is only available with entity and stateful session beans. With a stateless bean, you cannot use passivation because there is no state. When the passivation session returns, the bean is activated and the bean state is reloaded into an instance of the bean.