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We have an asp.net site running, which has been working fine for some time, but recently I have been experiencing some issues with IE8.

On posting some pages - mainly on our development server, although on staging too - we get an occasional "Internet Explore cannot display the webpage" error along with the button asking to diagnose connection problems. IE only seems to wait 10 seconds before timing out. I know that the page itself may take longer to load the first time (on dev and staging). So press F5 and everything then works fine.

Is there anything that should be done in the aspx page to tell IE to wait a bit longer?

I thought I had read that the default timeout supposed to be 90 seconds or something for browsers.

A bit more info:

It mostly happens on a POSTing a signup page, but that is just because I test that page and it starts the IIS App, makes the first connection to SQL and pre-caches some information. That first time the page can take 10-15 seconds to come back. IE8 times out after 10 seconds as it has had nothing back.

This happens on a dev W7x64 machine with 8GB RAM, as well as on a staging server WIN2008.

Having googled around a bit, some people are seeing the same problem, but no conclusive pointers to the problem or a solution.

It isn't a connection problem; everything works fine in Firefox, Chrome and even IE7; I have tried with add-ons disabled and resetting IE settings, still happens.

Ideas welcome.

cdm9002
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    Well, I have recently solved this. I happen to use some software called InstallAware, having installed it back soon after upgrading to Windows 7. Seems they (and others) set a registry setting during their install to force IE to timeout after 10 seconds. This because, they say, that their installers could get stuck otherwise. But they don't reset it back. WebUI Studio's install is another that does this. This link finally gave me the solution, http://intersoftpt.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/resolve-page-cannot-be-displayed-issue-in-ie8/ – cdm9002 May 04 '10 at 14:29
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    So, check the registry HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings for a key called ReceiveTimeout, and delete if it is there. – cdm9002 May 04 '10 at 14:30
  • We are seeing the InstallAware problem as well. I think it's triggered when the install needs a perquisite (eg .NET framework) and it is configured to download from Microsoft during the install. – Eric Labashosky Jun 07 '10 at 21:49
  • Thanks for the heads up on InstallAware. I never would have guessed that was the culprit! – Toby Mar 08 '11 at 01:20
  • Took me a long time to find this answer, but I'm very glad I did. Thank you for updating with your fix, cdm9002, you solved the problem I've been battling with for a week. – mdryden Feb 16 '12 at 23:05
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    You should have created an answer and accepted it. :) – bmavity Feb 26 '13 at 21:55
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    @cdm9002 You should answer your own question. – Nick DeVore Mar 08 '13 at 18:59

4 Answers4

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A 10 second timeout might be a usability tool in disguise. 10 seconds is a pretty long time. Js capable browsers are > 99% now, why not push it off over Ajax and poll until the long work is done, then redirect to the next page? You could show the user more useful progress info in the meantime. If for some reason the next page itself is the source of the slow down and cannot be separated from its slow parts, you could finish by precaching the next page then redirecting.

Chris Moschini
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Try this out

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="15"/> under system.web in the web.config
AnandMohanAwasthi
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I think that the long term solution is not actually related to timeout configuration.

You're saying that only the first request takes a long time, and it takes > 10 seconds, so you should issue a warm-up request first after installing your application in a way that the first request load is never experienced by the end user.

eis
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Check your Application pool Advanced settings in IIS. It may be lower than is normal. Maybe the Ping period? Mine is 30secs

BritishDeveloper
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