Over this past Christmas holiday week, when the website I work on was experiencing very low traffic, we saw several Request timed out exceptions (one on each day >> 12/26, 12/28, 12/29, and 12/30) on several pages that require user authentication. We rarely saw Request timed out exceptions prior to this very low traffic week.
It is possible that the application had no logged in users for some time before the Request timed out errors. But the exceptions were not on the login page but after the user had logged in. As noted earlier the exceptions were on pages that require user authentication.
Any ideas on what is causing this problem? Seeing that it is during very low traffic times it probably only affected the few customers that were working on the site but still I would like to understand this more.
This is an ASP.NET Web Forms application (using Forms Authentication) running on IIS7 on Windows Server 2008. SQL Server 2005 database.
Without knowing much about your setup or code, my best guess is that it might be due to memory being released from inactivity, or Hard Disks winding down, or a similar occurrence. Apart from that, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to have an application perform worse when traffic is low.