SAP J2EE server node hanging on startup

Have you ever had that dreadfull experience of a SAP J2EE not wanting to start?

A few days ago I restarted a Netweaver Portal (7.0) server and it's J2EE server nodes "hanged" on status STARTING APPS.
I created a dump stack trace of one of the server nodes, searched some OSS notes and realized it was the Application Thread's that was not enough.I increased the MaxThreadCount parameter of the ApplicationThreadManager as per Note 950921 (using the Configtool) to 100 and restarted the Portal server again, it then started up OK. SAP recommends that for XI system this parameter should at least be 150.
Here's a screenshot of the affected parameter in the Configtool:




The reason for this problem could be additional applications being deployed to the J2EE which uses more application threads or changes to the behaviour of deployed apps so always be sure to check this parameter value from time to time.

You can uses the thread dump viewer supplied by SAP Note 10202246 to make reading the dumps you create in the J2EE easier to read. Here's a screenshot of the viewer :


The following SAP Notes provide good starting points for J2EE troubleshooting:
Note 764417 - Information for troubleshooting of the SAP J2EE Engine 6.40
Note 710154 - How to create a thread dump for the J2EE Engine 6.40