ASP.NET SOAP call times out after 20 minutes

Question

We have an ASP.Net web service the call to which, due to some bad design, often takes more than 20 minutes to return. We have changed every setting that we can think of, but no matter what we do, we always get a timeout after 20 minutes.

It happens that this web service is a BizTalk orchestration exposed as a web service, but I do not think that is relevant -- the error is an ASP.Net error.

There must be some setting we can change to increase the timeout to more than 20 minutes, but we've exhausted our knowledge. What setting are we missing?

EDIT: Among other setting, we have tried those detailed here: http://weblogs.asp.net/aghausman/archive/2009/02/20/prevent-request-timeout-in-asp-net.aspx, which includes httpRuntime executionTimeout, sessionState timeout and app pool idle timeout.

Thanks, Jason

Answer 1

Sets the timeout to 60 minutes:

<system.web>
  <httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" />
</system.web>

For .NET 1.0 and 1.1. the default is 90 seconds. For 2.0+ is 110 seconds.

httpRuntime Element (ASP.NET Settings Schema)

Answer 2

Can I just confirm - BizTalk consumes this slow ASMX / WCF service and then re-publishes it (or aggregates this as part of an orch) and it is the consumer which is timing out? Grasping at straws here, but can you change this consumer to use WCF? If so, there are more knobs that you can tune e.g. in the client Bindings

sendTimeout = "00:XX:00"

Also, have you investigated KeepAlives?