Reporting Services 2005 Timout When Exporting via Web Service

Question

We're running into the same problem as reported here: PDF Export Huge Report

We're exporting a report from SSRS using the .asmx Web Services. Exporting via the Report Manager works fine, calling from code times out. We get:

Exception Message: The underlying connection was closed:
    An unexpected error occurred on a receive.

We've tried the same solutions tried by Dustin Brooks in his post.

• set the HttpRuntime ExecutionTimeout value to 3 hours on the report server
• disabled http keep alives on the report server
• increased the script timeout on the report server
• set the report to never time out on the server
• set the report timeout to several hours on the client call

I'm hoping someone may have come across a solution in the year that has past since his question was asked.

Answer 1

I've also run into this problem during my experience with SSRS 2005 and found this post by a MSDN MVP in the msdn forum:

"The Good News for this thread is the SQL 2008 Reporting Services is available and has vastly superior scalability for large reports than previous versions.

I can also say that we (Reporting Services team) heard the message about really large reports and the reasons for doing them. Honestly, it came as a suprise to us that people would want to execute such a large report interactively in a web page and wait for it to return. We've fixed our perception of the scenario and in SQL 2008 Reporting Services we set out to address reports of any size (millions of rows of data). You (hopefully) will be pleasently surprised at how well we are able to meet this scenario with the latest version. That being said, you'll still need the right hardware to run them on efficiently (lots of CPU, and memory), and you'll need to set your report execution, query, etc. timeouts appropriately.

Rendering really large reports to a browser session is not necessarily desireable. We'd actually recommend using a file share delivery of the PDF so that your user isn't waiting for the web page to respond.

Hope that helps, -Lukasz"

Not sure it helps but I've switched to SSRS 2008 since then (I know it's not always an option).