JBoss Messaging has its own Resource Manager for handling the lifespan of XA transactions. When a transaction is started the resource manager is notified and keeps a record of the transaction and its current state. It is possible in some cases for a transaction to be started but the forgotten about. Maybe the client died and never came back. If this happens then the transaction will just sit there indefinitely.

To cope with this JBoss Messaging can, if configured, scan for old transactions and rollback any it finds. The default for this is 60000 milliseconds (1 minute), i.e. any transactions older than 60 seconds are removed, however this can be changed by editing the transaction-timeout property in jbm-configuration.xml. The property transaction-timeout-scan-period configures how often, in milliseconds, to scan for old transactions.