Components are not initialised until an event is received for it. This means that if their are going to be any problems initialising a component, the prolem will not show itself straight away. Need to add a new config param that specifies how components are initialised in Mule .i.e. -Initialise no commponents - current behaviour -Initialise one commponent - load up the first component in the pool, further copies in the pool will be loaded as needed. -Initialise all commponents - populate the pool with the max number of components