WebSphere Peformance - Alexandre Polozoff's Point of View

Someone takes a javacore during what looks to be a hung app server and notices it contains lots of threads in socketRead.  This is symptomatic of a slow back end whether it is a database, Web service, etc.  An application is as strong as its weakest link.  If the backend the application depends on is unable to respond in a timely manner then there is nothing that can be tuned at the application layer except for aggressive timeouts to protect the application from getting stuck.  Hangs like these typically happen under high load/traffic conditions.  It is important that the group that maintains the backend is aware of an issue with their tier and they need to fix it.