Question : Entire portal becomes inaccessible when JDBC Connections fail or are otherwise unavailable.

We have a BEA Portal server running on Version 8.1.5.  In this portal there are just a couple of portlets (2) and a few applications that were ported from TomCat.  The portal has a number (18) JDBC Connection pools.  Our problem is when the back end databases become inaccesible (doesn't matter why - Bad IO, server down etc) the entire portal hangs and will not function.  We evenutally get the error message:
#### hMonitor> <> <> /GW/Tapps/apps/loyalty/lookup.jsp", which is more than the configured time (StuckThreadMaxTime) of "600" seconds.>

Once this occurs, the servers evenutally go into a FAILED state and the server must be restarted.  The actual Windows Service is still running - a restart of the service restarts the server and all is good - until another connection issue occurs.

ANY insight into this problem will be much appreciated.  Being new to the BEA Weblogic world I can use any and all suggestions.

Thanks

Answer : Entire portal becomes inaccessible when JDBC Connections fail or are otherwise unavailable.

Turns out because the database connections are not timing out the execution thread(s), of which there are only 15 by default, are being blocked.  Once the 15 threads become blocked then the server appears to be down - and eventually the "server" fails.