I feel that the XAResource transaction timeouts should be set based on the TransactionManager transaction timeout unless explicitly overridden by the xa-resource-timeout config param. I found out the hard way that the XAResource transaction timeout is independent of the TransactionManager transaction timeout. By making that the default configuration, setting the TransactionManager transaction timeout to a much longer value doesn't have much use if the individual XAResources still have short timeouts. I think most users would expect that setting the TransactionManager transaction timeout would affect all "related" timeout values. having the ability to set the value for the XAResource independently is a nice feature, but if unset, the default value should come from the TransactionManager.