A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for protocol servicing in network-attached storage. A protocol service executing in the data processing system in a clustered file system establishes a high priority recovery thread. The high priority recovery thread monitors health counters that count total requests in and total requests out for a client accessing a network-attached storage device via the protocol service. The high priority recovery thread determines a category of health of the protocol service based on the health counters. The mechanism takes corrective action based on the category of health of the protocol service.