AJAX Timeouts & Issues

Last week we released the AJAX version of one of our sites to the general public. We had QA tested the site pretty well including the end users to make sure we didn't run into any issues with the new AJAX functionality. The site is using basic AJAX, that is, we are using update panels to mainly improve the user experience.

Most of the users are not having any problems at all, but a small number are reporting script manager timeouts and others are getting the 12031 error. Both of these issues apprear to be pretty random, but they are repeatable outside our network. The calls that are getting the timeouts should be sub-second but once the call is made, ends up taking more than the default 90 seconds and the default error handling in the AJAX clients scripts gives a simple error popup. We don't see any server errors at all. I have even replicated what the user is doing at the same time and don't see any slow downs or delays.

Any ideas? Are we missing some configuration, firewall settings?

Thanks, Pat

Ok, we have narrowed down our issue. It seems our Cisco load balancer seems to be configure incorrectly or old version of firmware or something. If we bypass the load balancing, the site works fine. We still don't know why only a small number of people have this issue with the AJAX calls and most of the other don't. I will update this post as I find out more..

Did you find out any more about this?

My boss went to a client demo and was greeted with error messages when clicking any buttons that are inside a page with AJAX applied. The pages initially load fine, it's only on button clicks.

Like you posted, it works fine on our network, home networks and other corporate networks, but our client's network seems to handle things differently.

He even ran the demo on his own laptop which uses the site fine when he's in his own office.

The popup error we get is;

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server. The status cod returned from the server was : 12031

Been a while, but I figured that I would respond with some of the issue we ran into when deploying AJAX to the public. The majority of our users are internal, but we have about 1/3 of our users that are external and are all over the world...

"Access is denied" error when running AJAX page inside a iframe - this is a known issue and there is a "hack" to get it to work, but MS said that we will have to wait for .Net 3.5 for a real fix.

Oops, forgot the one that this post started with. We are using Cisco's CSS load balancer and the way our load balanced was designed was also causing not only too much traffic on our network, but also causing issues with AJAX. Our networking guy redesigned and all our issues went away. The old design was pretty strange and not recommended by Cisco, the new design is pretty standard.