IDM operations cause MS SQL Server to indefinitely lock rows on JPP 6

Issue

We are using Red Hat JBoss Portal Platform (JPP) 6 with some customizations to the login process. These customizations are causing several user attributes to be read and written during the login process:

• during every login, the number of failed logins is recorded in a user attribute;
• upon failure, it is incremented by one;
• upon success, it is set to zero.
• When users perform a self-service password reset, an attribute that records the last date they changed it is removed (to force them to update it the next time they log in).

With this customization, concurrent user login attempts can cause a deadlock scenario on the IDM tables in MS SQL Server.