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I have and MVC5 web-app running on Azure. Primarily this is a website but I also have a CRON job running (triggered from an external source) which calls a URL (a GET Request) to carry out some house keeping. This task is asynchronous can take up to and sometimes over the default timeout on Azure of 230 seconds. I'm regularly getting 500 errors due to this.

Now, I've done a bit of reading and this looks like it's something to do with the Azure Load Balancer settings. I've also found some threads relating to being able to alter that timeout in various contexts but I'm wondering if anyone has experience in altering the Azure Load Balancer timeout in the context of a Web App? Is it a straightforward process?

abatishchev
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scgough
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2 Answers2

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but I'm wondering if anyone has experience in altering the Azure Load Balancer timeout in the context of a Web App?

You could configure the Azure Load Balancer settings in virtual machines and cloud services. So, if you want to do it, I suggest you could deploy web app to Virtual Machine or migrate web app to cloud services. For more detail, you could refer to the link.

If possible, you could try to optimize your query or execution code.

Joey Cai
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This is a little bit of an old question but I ran into it while trying to figure out what was going on with my app so I figured I would post an answer here in case anyone else does the same.

An Azure Load Balancer (created via ANY means) which mostly comes along with an external IP Address — at least when created via Kubernetes / AKS / Helm — has the 4 min, 240 second idle connection timeout that you referred to.

That being said there are two different types of Public IP Addresses — Basic (which is almost always the default that you probably created) and Standard. More information on the docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-standard-overview

You can modify the idle timeout see the following doc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-tcp-idle-timeout

That being said changing the timeout may or may not solve your problem. In our case we had a Rails app that was connection to a database outside of azure. As soon as you add a Load Balancer with a Public IP all traffic will EXIT that public IP and be bound by the 4 minute idle timeout.

That's fine except for that Rails anticipates that a connection to a Database is not going to be cut frequently — which in this case happens ALL the time.

We ended up implementing a connection pooling service that sat between our Rails app and our real database (called PGbouncer — specific to Postgres DBs). That service monitored a connection and re-connected when the timer was nearing the Azure LB timeout.

It took a little while to implement but in our case it works flawlessly. You can see some more details over here: What Azure Kubernetes (AKS) 'Time-out' happens to disconnect connections in/out of a Pod in my Cluster?

The longest timeout you can set for a Public IP / Load Balancer is 30 minutes. If you have a connection that you would like to utilize that runs idle longer than that — then you may be out of luck. As of now 30 mins is the max.

Necevil
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