Configuring SFSB and Session Timeouts in JBoss AS

It is very important that the timeout for Stateful Session Beans is set higher than the timeout for HTTP Sessions, otherwise SFSB's may time out before the user's HTTP session has ended. JBoss Application Server has a default session bean timeout of 30 minutes, which is configured in server/default/conf/standardjboss.xml (replace default with your own configuration).

The default SFSB timeout can be adjusted by modifying the value of max-bean-life in the LRUStatefulContextCachePolicy cache configuration:

      <container-cache-conf>
        <cache-policy>org.jboss.ejb.plugins.LRUStatefulContextCachePolicy</cache-policy>
        <cache-policy-conf>
          <min-capacity>50</min-capacity>
          <max-capacity>1000000</max-capacity>
          <remover-period>1800</remover-period>

          <!-- SFSB timeout in seconds; 1800 seconds == 30 minutes -->
          <max-bean-life>1800</max-bean-life>  
          
          <overager-period>300</overager-period>
          <max-bean-age>600</max-bean-age>
          <resizer-period>400</resizer-period>
          <max-cache-miss-period>60</max-cache-miss-period>
          <min-cache-miss-period>1</min-cache-miss-period>
          <cache-load-factor>0.75</cache-load-factor>
        </cache-policy-conf>
      </container-cache-conf>

The default HTTP session timeout can be modified in server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/conf/web.xml for JBoss 4.0.x, or in server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/conf/web.xml for JBoss 4.2.x. The following entry in this file controls the default session timeout for all web applications:

   <session-config>
      <!-- HTTP Session timeout, in minutes -->
      <session-timeout>30</session-timeout>
   </session-config>

To override this value for your own application, simply include this entry in your application's own web.xml.