Spring @Async Not Working

Question

An @Async method in a @Service-annotated class is not being called asynchronously - it\'s blocking the thread.

I\'ve got

Answer 1

With the help of this excellent answer by Ryan Stewart, I was able to figure this out (at least for my specific problem).

In short, the context loaded by the ContextLoaderListener (generally from applicationContext.xml) is the parent of the context loaded by the DispatcherServlet (generally from *-servlet.xml). If you have the bean with the @Async method declared/component-scanned in both contexts, the version from the child context (DispatcherServlet) will override the one in the parent context (ContextLoaderListener). I verified this by excluding that component from component scanning in the *-servlet.xml -- it now works as expected.