The connection was reset ASP.NET

Question

I have some code that pulls data from SQL DB, then loops through the records to generate a string, which will eventually be written to a text file.

The code runs fine on my local, from VS, but on the live server, after about a minute and half, I get "No Data Received" error (chrome). The code stops in middle of looping through the DataTable. Hosting support said "The connection was reset" error was thrown.

I"m not sure if this is a timeout issue or what. I've set the executionTimeout in my web.config (with debug = false) and it didn't seem to help. I also checked the Server.ScriptTimeout property, and it does match the executionTimeout value set in the web.config. Additionally, a timeout would normally give "Page not available" message.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

after about a minute and half

There's your problem. This is a web application? A minute and a half is a very long time for a web application to respond to a request. Long enough that it's not really worth engaging in various trickery to make it kind of sort of work.

You'll want to offload this process to be more asynchronous with the web application itself. The nature of web applications is that they should receive a request and respond in a timely manner. What you have here is a long-running process which can't respond in a timely manner. The web application can facilitate interactions with the data, but shouldn't directly handle the processing thereof in the request/response directly.

How does the web application interact with the process? Does it just start it, or does it provide information for the process to begin? I would recommend that the process itself be handled by something like a Windows Service or perhaps a Console Application. The more de-coupled from the web application, the better. Now, since I don't know anything about the process itself, I'm making a few assumptions about its behavior...

The web application can receive a request to start the process, along with any information needed for the process. It can store this in a database with a status value (pending, queued, etc.) and then respond to the user (in a timely manner) that the request has been received and the process has been queued. The web application can have a page which checks the status so that the user can see how the process is doing (if it's started, how many records it's gone through, etc.).

The offline application (Windows Service, et al) would just monitor that database for newly-queued data to be processed. When it sees it, it updates the status (running, processing, etc.) and provides any relevant feedback during the process (number of records processed, etc.) by updating that data. So the offline application and the web application are both interacting with the same data, but not in a manner which blocks the thread of the web application and prevents a response to the user.

When the process is finished, the status is again updated. The web application can show that it's finished and provide a link to download the results. The offline process could even perhaps send an email to the user when it's done, or maybe the web application can have some kind of notification system (I'm picturing the little notification icons in Facebook) which would alert the user to new activity.

This way the thread isn't blocked, the user can continue to interact with the application (if there's even anything with which to interact), etc. And you get other added benefits, too. For example, results of the process are thus saved in the database and automatically historically tracked.

Answer 2

It sounds like it's the browser that's timing out waiting for a response, not on the server. You can't control what the browser has set for this. What you can do is send a response of some kind to the browser, so that it knows you're still around and haven't crashed in some way.

For this to work, you can't wait until you finish building the entire string. You need to re-think your code so that instead of appending to a string, you are writing each addition to an output stream. This has the added advantage of being a much more efficient way to create your text file. For purposes keeping the browser alive, you can write out anything, as long as some data is coming back for the browser to read. Html comments can work for this. You also need to periodically flush your response stream, so that your data isn't sitting buffered on your web server. Otherwise you might still timeout.

Of course, the real solution here is to re-think your design, such that your operation doesn't take 90 seconds plus in the first place. But until you can do that, hopefully this is helpful.