Couple of things jump out at me: 1) If the method is taking more than 5 minutes to execute, very likely that the root of this problem is a UserTx timeout. I wouldn't futz with the global setting, but override on this method alone 2) Any tuning you can do to optimize those batch inserts? You mention "repeatedly asking [the EM] to persist a large number of objects". Check the section on JDBC Batch Inserts, flushing the EM, etc from the Hibernate Documentation: http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/en/html/batch.html ...though not directly related to your problem, you might be able to get some dramatic performance improvements, depending upon your current implementation. S, ALR View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4088235#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...