Timeouts in Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Some time ago… at a Oracle SOA 11g project, we had to call an external webservice which took 1 to 5 minutes to respond. The composite calling this webservice was called by another composite from a BPEL process. As you might guess, we got an timeout resulting in faulted instances.
Increasing the timeout time wasn’t as easy as I expected, because it’s not one timeout setting that had to be increased, but a total of five timeout settings! To document this for myself in case I run into it again and to help others with the same problem I’ve wrote it down in this blogpost. If you are searching for how to increase the session timeout of the BPM worklist, go to this blogpost.

The five timeout settings in Oracle SOA Suite 11g:

1. In the composite.xml of the composites calling the long running webservice and the composites calling these composites (and thus the whole chain of calling composites), set the webservice binding property for read timeout (and optional the connection timeout) in the reference declaration (value in milliseconds):

   <reference name="xxx" ui:wsdlLocation="xxx.wsdl">
     <interface.wsdl interface="xxx#wsdl.interface(xxx_ptt)"/>
     <binding.ws port="xxx#wsdl.endpoint(xxx_ep/xxx_pt)" location="xxx.wsdl" soapVersion="1.1">
       <property name="oracle.webservices.httpConnTimeout" type="xs:integer" 
                 many="false" override="may">50000</property>
       <property name="oracle.webservices.httpReadTimeout" type="xs:integer" 
                 many="false" override="may">500000</property>
       <property name="weblogic.wsee.wsat.transaction.flowOption" type="xs:string" 
                 many="false">WSDLDriven</property>
     </binding.ws>
   </reference>
   

2. For the BPEL timeout set property SyncMaxWaitTime (value in seconds) in the SOA Suite console (Oracle Fusion Middleware Control): In the navigation menu on the left expand the “SOA” folder and select item “soa-infra (soa_server1)” just below it. Then in the top of the details screen on the right expand the drop down menu “SOA Infrastructure” and select “SOA Administration” -> “BPEL Properties” . The “BPEL Service Engine Properties” screen opens. Click on link “More BPEL Configuration Properties…” at the bottom of this screen. Now the “Application Defined MBeans: BPELConfig:bpel” screen opens and finally you can edit the setting SyncMaxWaitTime (scroll down, setting #32 in list).
    
3. Set timeouts in the soa EJB’s: Open the Weblogic console and click in the navigation menu on the left on “Deployments”. Expand “soa-infra” by clicking on [+] and expand node “EJBs” in the same way. Increase the “Transaction Timeout” (value in seconds) in the “Configuration” tab for the following EJB’s by clicking on them:
   • BPELEngineBean
   • BPELDeliveryBean
   • BPELActivityManagerBean
   • BPELServerManagerBean
   • BPELProcessManagerBean
   • BPELInstanceManagerBean
   • BPELFinderBean
4. Increase the JTA timeout in the Weblogic console by selecting “soa_domain” in the navigation menu (top item) on the left. Then select tab “Configuration” and subtab “JTA”. The first setting is the “Timeout Seconds” (value in seconds).
    
5. To solve “HeuristicMixedException” timeouts, set the “XA Transaction Timeout” of the soa jdbc connection to 0 seconds (means inherit) by expanding “Services” -> “JDBC” and select “Data Sources”. In the screen on the right select “SOADataSource” from the list and select tab “Configuration” and subtab “Transaction”. Enable setting “Use XA Datasource Interface” and setting “Set XA Transaction Timeout” and set setting “XA Transaction Timeout:” to 0 (inherit globale Weblogic transaction timeout).