ajax request times out frequently,how to fix?

Question

It seems such things never happened to SO,did they use some special technique?

Answer 1

This isn't a real question, but some trivial advice:

1. Make your site faster.
2. Load less data in the ajax call
3. Make use of caching

Answer 2

1. Profile your code to make sure it is fast.

2. Check server response times.

3. Work on performance of your service.

Answer 3

Make sure you're timing out using Firebug and see the error code.

If it's true and you're really timing out Find out what's going on the server-side, go and feed the script AJAX is calling server-side, feed it the same arguments and see what happens, debug it independently of AJAX, fix the problem and write some tests to make sure it won't come up again
(or if it does you'll know what's the problem).