The JAXBContext are being cached by the JAXBContextHandler, but yes, there is some performance hit.   But I felt it was worth it to not write our own clone method which will need to change if the schema changes.  A better approach might be to use a xjc plugin that will insert a clone() implementation on the generated sources, but I did not want to mess around with the Schema generation plugin this late in the game.

I updated a ticket that is related to this:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CXF-3354