Hi,

I have an ASP.NET app written with ASP.NET 2.0 using Windows Authentication. We have set the Session timeout to 120 minutes. This app calls an external process which returns data that is then displayed on the page. If the process returns relatively quickly, say less than 10 or 15 minutes, it all works fine. However, if the process takes a long time to return, say 90 minutes (there is a lot of computation going on), when it returns, it asks for the user to log in again before displaying the data. What is causing this and how can we extend that timeout to 120 minutes? I have seen attributes in web.config for Forms authentication, but not for Windows.

Thanks.

Dan

Personally your problem is not the session timeout it's the fact you are calling an aspx page that runs for over a couple of minutes.  You might want to think about a different way of doing it.  If you describe what you are trying to do and why the process taks so long maybe myself or others will help you come up with a better solution or give you ideas to research.

That is a reasonable comment and I will explain, although as a practical matter this is now a production application and re-architecting at this point will be difficult.

The web page is a front end for an analysis engine. The actual analysis is performed on a huge historical database using MatLab, which returns XML data to be displayed in grids and graphical data to be displayed in image maps. Most of the reports take only a minute or two to generate because many of the computations are done in batch mode ahead of time for the "default" reports. However, sometimes the user selects non-typical report parameters, requiring that MatLab compute everything from scratch, hence the long execution times.

MatLab is notoriously slow for this app, but that is what was used by the firm developing the application for their client. I was responsible for the front end calling the analytic engine and then displaying the results.

I suppose the web site could be redesigned in an asynchronous manner, with a callback when the report is complete, but at the time the spec was written, this did not even seem to be remotely an issue. Now the project is completed and works well in most of the cases. I don't think it is a Session timeout, per se, since we have set the Session timeout in both web.config and IIS to 120 minutes. Bumping this from 60 minutes to 120 did in fact eliminate Session timeout issues, but then this login issue arose. That is what I need to address now.

Thanks.

Dan

Ok sounds fair....

If the users are logging onto a windows environment and it is controled by active directory (domain) there is the chance that there is a domain policy in place to log the user out of the "windows session" after so many minutes of inactivity, this would be done for security reasons.  I think your next step would be to talk with whoever is in charge with the windows network and pass it off to them as you say it is not a web session timeout and I would agree with you.

Thanks, we will try that route.