1. A system for providing a work manager for use in an application server environment, comprising: one or more computers, including an application server environment executing thereon, together with a plurality of deployable resources which can be used within the application server environment, one or more partitions, wherein each partition provides an administrative and runtime subdivision of a domain; a partition work manager configurable, by a system administrator, to assign a fair share value to each of the one or more partitions within the application server environment, each fair share value configured for use by the system to control thread usage associated with one or more partitions.