I was hoping that there was some configuration I could set so that if an invocation took more than a certain amount of time it would automatically throw an exception. It sounds as if you are saying there is not such configuration and offer a couple of alternatives. One alternative is to create a thread in an interceptor and have the work done in that new thread. The interceptor could wait on that thread with a timeout and throw and excpetion if the thread does not return in time. I can see how that would work, but it would double the number of threads in our system, which worries me. The other alternative is to program with futures. I am not quite clear how to do this, but I suspect it is an approach we would not want. We like the api to be synchronous from the client point of view. Also, the api is quite large, so I suspect there would be a lrage number of changes to make this work. Could you say if I am reading your responses correctly? I appreciate your help. Unfortunately, I am not sure that either of these approaches are ones we want to take. Thanks, Harold View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4013343#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...