When a transaction begins in "server 1" and an EJB remoting request is made to "server 2" the timeout value for the transaction branch in "server 2" is initially set to Integer.MAX_VALUE which means set-tx-query-timeout does not work properly on datasources enlisted in the distributed branch of the transaction in server 2. This essentially requests that statement execution not be timed out at all (though in some cases the large value seems to result in abnormally fast timeout after a couple of seconds).