Servlet thread running for more than an hr for generating the excel. Have you checked how much time does it usually take to generate Excel with out any web framework. How many requests does this servlet get concurrently? Does each of those threads take about 1 hr to generate the excel.
Is having a web framework an absolute requirement for the generation of an excel ? Can you make this asynchronous and send the results back, only if the task is completed. I heard servlet 3.0 has asynchronous feature. Even if you are not using 3.0, I think still
you should be able to make this asynchronous background task by some other means, instead of keeping your servlet thread handling 1 request for an hr.
I think, first of all, before you employ servlets, try tuning your logic and see if the actual component generating excel is taking that long time and if yes, how can you minimize it.
secondly, as I said, you may have to look at running these process in background, so that you don't keep servlet thread waiting for 1 hr to send the response back.
Thirdly, you can also think about asynchronous webservice call.