TimerService in Transaction?

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I'm stuck on the following: I have two message-driven beans MDB1 and MDB2 connected through two JMS queues (each MDB has its own queue). MDB uses a timer service to poll a database every now and then. Both beans have Container as its transaction type, with transaction attribute Required for their method onMessage.

Whenever I happen to erroneously create a second timer for MDB2, I see that new instances of MDB2 are created (I'm logging the ejbCreate method) which finally hog my server, bringing it to a grinding halt.

I suspect duplicate MDB2 beans are created though transaction rollback, but as I don't see any other error messages, I'm completely clueless.

Also, I'd like to associate one single timer with MDB2, but I cannot seem to create it in the ejbCreate method. What is the standard approach here?

Any help is appreciated...

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Also, I notice that my server.log is filled up with logging messages from com.arjuna.ats.arjuna etc. (level DEBUG) Could it be that crash recovery of a timer keeps my server busy?