JBoss.org Community Documentation
Fortunately, JBoss is able to perform deadlock detection. JBoss holds a global internal graph of waiting transactions and what transactions they are blocking on. Whenever a thread determines that it cannot acquire an entity bean lock, it figures out what transaction currently holds the lock on the bean and add itself to the blocked transaction graph. An example of what the graph may look like is given in Table 11.1, “An example blocked transaction table”.
| Blocking TX | Tx that holds needed lock |
|---|---|
| Tx1 | Tx2 |
| Tx3 | Tx4 |
| Tx4 | Tx1 |
Table 11.1. An example blocked transaction table
Before the thread actually blocks it tries to detect whether there is deadlock problem. It does this by traversing the block transaction graph. As it traverses the graph, it keeps track of what transactions are blocked. If it sees a blocked node more than once in the graph, then it knows there is deadlock and will throw an ApplicationDeadlockException. This exception will cause a transaction rollback which will cause all locks that transaction holds to be released.