Thread: "The operation has timed out" Error with WSI Test Program

I have successfully used the WSI Test Program for various tasks, however I need to be able to "GetProduct" w/ Variants for an entire Manufacturer. There are probably 800+ products (one variant each) for this Manufacturer. I have no problem with a super long XML file myself, but apparently the WSI Test Program or something else does as I get "The operation has timed out" error each time I try to "GetProduct" w/ Variants for that Manufacturer and others similar in size. I have increased the timeout in IIS and can't find any related timeout value in web.config. Please advise on this.

I also time out when running Product Feeds through the admin. Not sure if this is related.

800+ products shouldn't be that much retrieving that would cause WSI to time-out before the process is complete, but if you're getting such issue that would be something to do with your resources (e.g. server specs/hosting package, does your sql and web server located on the same location?, etc). Whatever is the case, you can simple work-around this by retrieving them by batch, probably by 100's.

As for the feeds, what version are you using? In the latest builds of AspDotNetStorefront ML (v8.0+), we've added a method there to support retrieval of records per 20k/file. Like, if you've got 40k products the software will create two separate feed files for you, the first feed contains the first 20k products while the second one will be for the succeeding 20+. Hence, it would best if you can upgrade to the latest build.

Originally Posted by AspDotNetStorefront Staff - Alfred

800+ products shouldn't be that much retrieving that would cause WSI to time-out before the process is complete, but if you're getting such issue that would be something to do with your resources (e.g. server specs/hosting package, does your sql and web server located on the same location?, etc). Whatever is the case, you can simple work-around this by retrieving them by batch, probably by 100's.

As for the feeds, what version are you using? In the latest builds of AspDotNetStorefront ML (v8.0+), we've added a method there to support retrieval of records per 20k/file. Like, if you've got 40k products the software will create two separate feed files for you, the first feed contains the first 20k products while the second one will be for the succeeding 20+. Hence, it would best if you can upgrade to the latest build.

Yes, the SQL/Web Server are located at the same location. How can I retrieve them in batches? I am using this call... how would I change it to retrieve multiple batches?

C#/VB.NET Code:

<AspDotNetStorefrontImport>
 <GetProduct ForEntityType="Manufacturer" ForEntityID="13" IncludeVariants="true"/>
</AspDotNetStorefrontImport> 


I am using ML8 for the feeds. I don't have 20k+ products in the feed, more like 14k-15k right now. So that is not the issue.

What changes can be made server-side to eliminate these timeout errors?

I have been working on this relentlessly all weekend long and am racking up one lengthy support ticket with my server host.... still no progress at all though. The timeout occurs on product feeds, larger WSI calls like the one described, and also on monthly maintenance. I very eagerly look forward to more info on this.

You're probably going to want to submit this to our support team so we can ask some questions regarding your hosting provider, configuration and setup, and possibly gain access to the site to take a look. Depending on what's going on we may also need to get some information from your and/or your host from the server event logs. It could also be related to the hosting environment. If you're on a shared server with multiple sites running then executing a web service call for 15k products may only go through depending on the traffic to the other sites...not just yours. You should also provide the support team with your full 4 digit version number as there were changes in the feed execution from 8.0.0.0 to 8.0.1.2.

Originally Posted by AspDotNetStorefront

have you set this up on your own dev box, and got it working there?

environmental issues like this can be a real bitch to find

so we have to start narrowing things down a bit (ruling them out)

e.g. if it fails on localhost, we can debug it, if it doesn't fail on localhost, we know it's a hosting setup issue (or ISP issue), etc.

next, run from localhost WSI (web) to host/server DB (still works or not). tells us even more.

etc.

800 products should not timeout

I have tried this from a client/remote computer as well on the actual host/server computer with the same results. I am not sure if this is what you mean...

Originally Posted by AspDotNetStorefront Staff - George

You're probably going to want to submit this to our support team so we can ask some questions regarding your hosting provider, configuration and setup, and possibly gain access to the site to take a look. Depending on what's going on we may also need to get some information from your and/or your host from the server event logs. It could also be related to the hosting environment. If you're on a shared server with multiple sites running then executing a web service call for 15k products may only go through depending on the traffic to the other sites...not just yours. You should also provide the support team with your full 4 digit version number as there were changes in the feed execution from 8.0.0.0 to 8.0.1.2.

I decided to submit a support ticket a couple hours ago. This is a dedicated server. The event logs show the timeouts. I am on version 8.0.1.2. I will be sure and update my support case with some more info.

also, does it run ok on a dev box (localhost)? without timeout?

if that's ok, then run from localhost (web) to production db (another test)

these environmental issues can be a real bear to narrow down, but you have to divide and conquer.

Forgive my ignorance, but I don't believe I have a devbox/dev envirnoment to test in. I ported my production site over to this server a few months ago and did not do any development work on it. I must say though, I had the same feed timeout issue on my last server which was a shared server. This is a dedicated server and between myself and server support, we have modified the App Pool, web.config, machine.config, and IIS to support longer periods before timing out and the issue still persists. From what I read online, this is often an issue with the application rather than the server and a change or two can be made on the app side to prevent timeouts from occurring. Unfortunately I am not advanced enough to mess with the WSI test program in this way and I don't have the source code for ASPDNSF in case that would be necessary to make changes to the feed generator itself.

Like George indicated, send into support. thx.

I did open the ticket earlier and have received one response. I replied a couple of times and have not heard back yet. Hopefully this can be resolved through the ticketing process. I do want to add that I just successfully completed a "getProduct" for a total of 547 products/variants without timing out. I still timeout on larger groups of products/variants.

We'll help sort it out, our support team is pretty good, and they will bug dev if needed

Correction: Your support team is excellent

Once this timeout issue is resolved and the styling issues between IE7+ and Firefox are resolved, I should be good to go. These two problems are just really getting to me, needless to say.

I experienced a problem doing product uploads on Mosso Cloud. I was told at the time that it was related to resources of the hosting environment. There are too many issues on Mosso, especially the distributed database there does not play well with AspDotNetStorefront (queries take too long). I switched hosting and did NOT have the same issue in the new environment.

Your hosting company has standard setups for how they allocate resources. So they are not likely to change the settings you need. But it could be that you have access to configure the server to overcome this issue. I'm not in a position to advise you about this.

What I did is this. I have a big spreadsheet of all the products I want to upload. From that I put about 90-100 rows into a separate bulk upload template. In Admin, if the file was a size to go through the bulk upload would happen. If the file was too big, it would generate an error. When you get in a groove with a good system, it goes pretty quickly. I uploaded 2 batches of about 5,500 records this way.

For downloads, you can set up an Access database to have remote access to your web db (on a dedicated server you can do this). Link in all the tables. Create your desired select query (save it) and then you can export the results to csv or Excel.

Of course this is more of a workaround for one-time information transfer as part of getting one or more databases set up with the data you want.

Thanks for the feedback. I am still working on this with ASPDNSF and my server, but I do like that Access idea. I may give that a try someday.

For the sake of other members' reference, upgrading from 2GB to 3GB of RAM didn't fix this issue. It is still occurring and is unresolved.

Since upgrading the RAM, increasing the global ASP.net timeout value seems to have helped with my product feed timeouts. I am still having the "The Operation Timed Out" error when trying to make calls through the WSI test program that would retrieve what I am guessing to be about 700-800 products/variants or more. Though I have successfully retrieved 500-600 products/variants through the WSI test program without problem. Is anyone else having this problem?