The problem in this case was that when an incoming request was received put there was a pending request as well, the pending request was replaced by the new request without handling the pending request first, by replying with an empty response. This caused the pending request to get lost in the void, but holding on to a precious Tomcat thread.
Now the pending requests gets satisfied first with an empty response, thus releasing the Tomcat thread, and then the new incoming request is set as the new pending request. Marking this one as FIXED.
Changed Fix Version(s) to 1.7-Beta 1