How can an EJB parallelize a long, CPU intensive process?

Question

The application has a CPU intensive long process that currently runs on one server (an EJB method) serially when the client requests it.

It’s theoretically possible

Answer 1

You've analyzed the situation quite well, and no, there is not patern for this that match the EJB model.

Creating threads is mainly forbidden because it bypass the app. server thread management strategy and also because of the transactions.

I worked on a project with similar requireements and I decided to spawn additional threads (going against the sepc then). The operation to parallelized was read-only, so it worked regarding the transaction (the thread would basically have not transaction associated to them). I also knew that I wouldn't spawn too many threads per EJB calls, so the number of threads was not an issue. But if your threads are supposed to modify data, then you break the transactional model of the EJB seriously. But if your operation in pure computing, that might be ok.

Hope it helps...