.net Application is timing out and everyone is blaming SQL Server

You may face a situation where you are called in to investigate SQL Server as the applications are experiencing errors reporting time out. If you do not find anything from SQL Server, most likely it is from web server.

If your web server is too busy, it may take time to process a request and time out may happen at that point for the configuration file of the site. However as .net will throw a general time out message only (unless the application is well designed), many time I found people to doubt on database server’s performance.

To resolve this issue, you can add the stateNetworkTimeout attribute to the sessionState settings in web.config and machine.config and increase the value as below:

< sessionState stateNetworkTimeout="15" / > (Please remove the space between < s at the beginning and / and > at the end)

Before implementing this change, you can verify the problem’s existence from web server’s event log. Event ID 1072 and event ID 1076 may be logged in the event log if web server is in stress and cannot complete session accesses on time.