WFLYEJB0378: “Failed to acquire a permit within 5 MINUTES” error in AEM Forms on JEE (JBOSS)

Last update: Tue Sep 23 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

When invoking AEM Forms on JEE services (for example, via Axis/soap endpoints), calls intermittently fail with a timeout error. This is due to EJB instance pool exhaustion in the JBoss container. Increase the transaction timeout and tune the JBoss configuration to bring the service up.

Description description

Environment

Product: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) - Forms on JEE
App server: JBoss
Scope: Stateless session beans (SLSB) and/or message-driven beans (MDB) under load or long‑running operations (workflows, watch folders, heavy service calls)

Issue / Symptoms

Service invocations fail with WFLYEJB0378: Failed to acquire a permit within 5 MINUTES error.
Axis/soap stack traces show ALC‑DSC‑099‑000 and DSCRuntimeException.
Occurs during peak load or when long-running/busy processes are active.

Error log:

Error:
17:13:02,911 INFO [ org.apache.axis.EXCEPTIONS] (default task-92) AxisFault:: ALC-DSC-099-000: com.adobe.idp.dsc.DSCRuntimeException: javax.ejb.EJBException: *WFLYEJB0378: Failed to acquire a permit within 5 MINUTES*
org.apache.axis.AxisFault.makeFault(AxisFault.java:101) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.providers.java.JavaProvider.invoke(JavaProvider.java:331) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.strategies.InvocationStrategy.visit(InvocationStrategy.java:32) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.SimpleChain.doVisiting(SimpleChain.java:118) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.SimpleChain.invoke(SimpleChain.java:83) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.handlers.soap.SOAPService.invoke(SOAPService.java:420) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.server.AxisServer.invoke(AxisServer.java:281) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]
at org.apache.axis.transport.http.AxisServlet.doPost(AxisServlet.java:684) [ axis-1.4.1.1.jar:]

Resolution resolution

Note: Increasing max-pool-size may resolve thread exhaustion but risks JVM resource strain, OS limits, and masking deeper architectural issues—adjust with caution and proper capacity planning.

To resolve this issue:

Increase the transaction timeout if long-running processes are expected to prevent premature failures.

Update the JBoss configuration by adjusting the strict-max-pool settings in standalone.xml or lc_turnkey.xml to increase max-pool-size and instance-acquisition-timeout values, for example:

code language-none

code language-none
`<strict-max-pool name="slsb-strict-max-pool" max-pool-size="200" instance-acquisition-timeout="10" instance-acquisition-timeout-unit="MINUTES"/> <strict-max-pool name="mdb-strict-max-pool" max-pool-size="200" instance-acquisition-timeout="10" instance-acquisition-timeout-unit="MINUTES"/>`

<strict-max-pool name="slsb-strict-max-pool" max-pool-size="200" instance-acquisition-timeout="10" instance-acquisition-timeout-unit="MINUTES"/>
<strict-max-pool name="mdb-strict-max-pool" max-pool-size="200" instance-acquisition-timeout="10" instance-acquisition-timeout-unit="MINUTES"/>

Refer to Installing and Deploying Adobe Experience Manager Forms on JEE for JBoss for more details.

If the JBoss service becomes unresponsive, manually terminate the Java process and restart the application server to restore normal operation.
After applying the configuration changes, restart the server and verify the logs to confirm that the error no longer appears and services are functioning correctly.

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