Hello all, In order to reduce thread contention, especially on CPU starved machines, encoders are no longer responsible for writing to an OutputStream. Here is the new Encoder interface. public interface Encoder<E> extends ContextAware, LifeCycle { byte[] headerBytes(); byte[] encode(E event); byte[] footerBytes(); } As you can see, the above Encoder interface does not take in an OutputStream as a parameter. Comments welcome, -- Ceki