We are running a high volume application (webservice engine platform middleware) on jboss.

All the transactions are short lived and we have timeout set on every transaction so we make sure we kill the transaction if exceeds certain time.
Noticed yesterday that busy threads value kept on going up and jboss was not responding after it reached max (300). We noticed this trend from 1:30pm and it reached max at 9:30pm.. The busy thread cout was on upward trend . We have cluster of 4 instances and this happened on only one instance.

Any thoughts?