We have a simple service that handles emailing for our web applications. It
takes the request information and sends the email using SMTP through Exchange.
It usually works great, but Web service call timeouts have been a nuisance from
the beginning.
If for some reason the application server where this application runs gets
overloaded (CPU utilization near 100%) it is common for our client apps to get
timeouts calling the service. The issue is not related to our code, we already
tested and response is quite fast.
This happens even though we already raised the client timeout to 120 seconds
(which seems huge) and yet, this still happens... especially during server
startup. The following is the code we used:
<http-conf:conduit name="*.http-conduit">
<http-conf:client AllowChunking="false" ConnectionTimeout="120000"/>
</http-conf:conduit>
Is this kind of long web service delay normal during high CPU utilization? Is
there something that we need to configure to make the web service more
responsive even during high utilization of the application server? Should we
increase the timeout to a ridiculously high 5 minutes to prevent the problem?
