A transaction processing system comprises a transaction processing (TP) subsystem (11) executed on a TP server (21), a recovery subsystem (13), executed on a recovery server (23) and one or more resource subsystems (12) executed on one or more resource servers (22). The TP subsystems (11) are configured to access the one or more resource subsystems (12), wherein the TP server (21) is not the same server as the recovery server (23), and wherein the recovery subsystem (13) itself, or a DBMS log that the recovery subsystem is configured to read from and to write to, is configured to clean up pending transactions created in the transaction processing system, in the event of failures, wherein the recovery subsystem (13) is configured to receive logging information from the one or more TP subsystems (11), and to store logging information in transaction log records in a recovery storage (25); the recovery subsystem (13) is configured to access the one or more resource subsystems (12) to perform, in the one or more resource subsystems (12), recovery actions in the event of failures, based on the logging information, and the recovery subsystem (13) is able to run without any functionality of the one or more TP subsystems (11) being available.