"eharoldw" wrote : In order to do this with an interceptor, would I not have to make a separate thread? yes. most state is held in the invocation object with couple of notable exceptions (security, tx on the thread), so basically you could disconnect your incoming thread from the actual worker thread by passing the invocation on -- you can return the calling thread based on your timeout and appropriate timeout indicators and let the worker thread die eventually if it didn't finish within the given time limit. this however is going well beyond the EJB component contract and the expected behavior which is why a custom container (via interceptors) is probably what you should do (clean break from EJB component model) -- you may even be best doing this with purely POJO and/or AOP containers rather than EJB, depending on how much you rely on the other existing services the EJB spec provides (tx, sec, concurrency, pooling, etc). hope it helps View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4012573#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...