What happens when a page render times out?

Question

I have a question that I can't quite find the answer to...

If you have an ASP.Net page that takes longer than the request time-out to render what happens to that process? Does the web service abort it?

Lets say I'm writing XML to the response stream in an ASP.Net page and it times-out calling my GenerateXML method. What happens to my method call? Does it complete but the web server reports the time out? or is it aborted?

I could probably write a test to see my own results but I figure there might be more to it.

Answer 1

Since the rendering process does not know anything about session timeouts per se, my assumption is that the rendering completes without any problem. It's just when the user performs an action on the rendered page that is sent back to the server, that the tiemout is realized.

I can't back this up by any proof right now, but to me this is the most logical behaviour. Anything else would require additional timeout checks in the rendering process, which costs cpu time (= money), but would not improve session security in any way.

Answer 2

Let's clarify: There are at least two timeouts in your question (1) session timeout (2) request timeout. The most common scenario is request timeout - since client doesn't want to wait minutes until server alive. And as usual request lifetime is less than session. In this case server terminates request in usual way - by raising ThreadAbortException. This exception is raised even if everything okay, just to terminate request processing.

When session is over - client even should not know about it. Only if you have autorization client would be redirected to login page. But server code can lost data stored in session.