Sql server management studio reporting "The semaphore timeout period has expired."

Question

On our development sql server, executing any query containing more than approximately 700 characters stalls for about 10 seconds and then reports the following error:

Msg 121, Level 20, State 0, Line 0
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.)

for example, this query

select * from FooTable where id = ' (.. and then 700 spaces ..) '

fails fails with the timeout error while this one

select * from FooTable where id = ' (.. and then 600 spaces ..) '

fails with the expected Msg 8169, Level 16, State 2, Line 1 Conversion failed when converting from a character string to uniqueidentifier. - immediately.

Indeed, throwing any query, including random garbage at our dev sql server exhibits this behaviour, while any other sql server I have available acts as expected, so I would think that the query never actually gets to parsing on the server.

I'm at a loss here - any hints?

Answer 1

After a restart of the client machines, the issue has resolved itself - apparently there had been some changes to the hardware setup of the server and two development boxes that we tested on had not picked up on those.

That is not to claim I completely understand what was going on though..