How to change default JTA transaction timeout in JBoss EAP?

Environment

• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6
• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7
• coordinator-environment specified in
  • jboss-as-txn_1_0.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_1_1.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_1_2.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_1_3.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_1_4.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_1_5.xsd
  • jboss-as-txn_2_0.xsd
• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 8

Issue

• Change the JTA transaction timeout
• Specify the default-timeout for the transaction reaper / coordinator-environment
• Disable transaction timeout for a pool where the datasource does not support transaction timeout

Resolution

The default transaction timeout has been defined under "default-timeout" attribute at "transactions" subsystem in the application server configuration.¹

• The default is 300 seconds / 5 minutes.

The default transaction timeout is meant to provide a safeguard against unexpectedly long running transactions which may negatively impact system performance as a whole. For this reason, increasing the default is not recommended in a production system as this weakens the ability of JBoss to protect the system from unexpected behavior. In most cases, the proper resolution for a long running transaction is to address performance problems that lead to the failure of the transaction to complete in a timely fashion. If issues with a specific workflow cannot be addressed, a per-transaction timeout should be used. If per-transaction timeout cannot be used as a workaround, the following may be used with caution.

• You may modify the value to increase the default transaction timeout
• You may set the value to 0 to disable the transaction reaper / transaction timeout
  • Disabling transaction timeout is not recommended in a production system as this opens a dangerous vulnerability that may have a system wide impact (e.g. negatively impacting database servers, the network, etc.).
• The application server VM must be restarted for the default-timeout change to be applied

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:transactions:1.4">
    ...(snip)...
    <coordinator-environment default-timeout="300"/>  <!-- HERE -->
</subsystem>

For JBoss EAP 8

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:transactions:6.0">
....
....
     <coordinator-environment statistics-enabled="${wildfly.transactions.statistics-enabled:${wildfly.statistics-enabled:false}}" default-timeout="300"/>  <!-- HERE -->
....
</subsystem>

You can use CLI² or management console to achieve the same:

• On CLI: Execute the following CLI in jboss-cli.sh to modify the value. The following example is changing the value to 600 seconds. Note that you need to prepend /profile=<your-profile-name> to the CLI in domain mode:

/subsystem=transactions:write-attribute(name=default-timeout,value=600)

• On the management console: Please select "Profile" tab and select "Container". Then click on "Transactions" to edit the default timeout.

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