IIS/Azure IIS - restrict max response time

Question

The web service I develop must respond in 6 seconds max. If web service is unabled to respond in 6 seconds it must respond with some hardcoded data.

The web service is kind of proxy which transforms incoming data and makes a request to another service. That service is third-party and may fail or respond too long.

Currently there is restriction in application code which limits timeout to third-party service to 3 seconds (remember, total respond time is 6 seconds max).

But the problem is application has very high load and sometimes it is unabled to execute their code in rest of 3 seconds (but without loading our app code is executed in milliseconds, there are really a little of code). I believe that Windows is unabled to run all threads and sometimes threads sleeps more than 3 seconds, and max respond time is violated without possibility to handle this.

The application is developed in asp.net core in C# and fully async.

So question: is it possible to limit response time on IIS level? Is it possible to respond with predefined data if timeout occured? Is there a way except adding extra instances to Azure to improve responsiveness? Is there a programmatic way to handle timeouts robust?

EDIT

I need

Guaranteed response time on IIS with high-load. Is it possible at all on non-realtime OS?
When request is not processed in time send predefined hardcoded response.
Do this on Azure

it sounds like you need to increase the resources available for your azure instance and/or add additional instances with load balancing. You'd probably also want to look for any performance bottlenecks in your application code as well and address those. — user1666620, Mar 21 '16 at 14:35

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 22 '16 at 07:28

For the configuration itself, you're limited to minutes which you could have used as a simple escape, however, you're not able to do this so I guess I would use something similar to the Enterprise Library Retry Logic, that is, make a small class that takes a method and a timeout value:

public class TimeRestrictor{
  public bool InvokeAction(Action action, TimeSpan timeout){

  }

  public Tuple<bool, T> InvokeFunction<T>(Func<T> function, TimeSpan timeout){

  }
}

You can easilly implement this class with a timer of some sorts, also using async/await (I left those out for simplicity)

It would then be a matter of calling this method as:

var ranInTime = timeRestrictor.InvokeAction(MyMethod, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(6));
if(!ranInTime){
  SetTimeOutResult();
}

This needs some tweaking, I'm just writing this code off the top of my head, but gives you a general idea of my suggestion.

IIS/Azure IIS - restrict max response time

1 Answers1