Liferay portal may appear to hang or be unresponsive when importing a LAR or publishing to staging. This occurs if the database used in your environment is a SQL Server with default transaction isolation settings and it occurs regardless of the size of the content.
Resolution
1. Set in portal-ext.properties:
jdbc.default.liferay.pool.provider=dbcp
jdbc.default.defaultTransactionIsolation=READ_COMMITTED
2. Run queries:
ALTER DATABASE lportal SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON;
ALTER DATABASE lportal SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON;