Timeout Error Messages

You will sometimes get an error message that mentions a timeout value. You can recognize these error messages by virtue of their containing a long and boring string of text followed by some numbers.

The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local socket timeout was '00:01:00'.

In context, these numbers are exciting. This is primarily due to them being considered in immediate relation to a string of text that, as has previously been mentioned, is long and boring. Numbers are something that you can understand without having to read the rest of the text.

Unfortunately, these numbers are most often not particularly helpful and should be ignored.

When you see a timeout value in an error message, it is information about one of the call parameters. This isn't a statement that the timeout caused the error. It is a hint to help you think about what might have caused the error.

If the timeout value says 1 minute and you see the error after 3 seconds, then the timeout value is probably unrelated to the error.

If you find yourself waiting for quite a while and then see a timeout value for a shorter interval than you waited, then the timeout value may have some connection to the error. Often, this connection is that you should go looking for something else that went wrong because the thing that went wrong was supposed to have finished what it was doing before the timeout expired.

Next time: Adding Headers to a Call

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  I've been playing with the DataContractJsonSerializer that comes with Orcas recently to produce some