ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit communication problems

Question

We have a user who uses our site over 3G. The asp.net 2.0 application uses the AJAX toolkit updatepanels to provide a view of some data. I'm getting complains that sometimes elements within the updatepanel are missing. I believe this to be down to communication issues of the ajax calls but am having trouble repeating the issue.

How would you suggest that we troubleshoot these issues? Is there any way to increase the timeouts? Any way to catch the "error" or add in some debugging to the ajax toolkit to find out what the hell is happening?

The user is running on IE7 on a laptop across a 3G link...

Edit: After more research this issue may be down to thread-death. Each of the separate components are populated in a thread by a function to speed things up a little. Is it possible that IIS kills threads sometimes?

Answer 1

Your question raises a multitude of other questions.

Are the AJAX Toolkit component "inside" some other AJAX components, perhaps a standard .NET AJAX component, or some other third party component?

I have run into problems whith components, Telerik for example, not working when stuck inside other, non-Telerik, components. Although it should be effecting others users as well, not just 3G users. However there might be some timing issue to it, only causing slower connections to manifest the issue.

Is this effecting all components randomly, or only specific components - like databases, or graphic intence components? What kind of device is this displayed on - laptop with 3G modem, or some hand held device? What browser and version is being used?

And, of course, you also need to ask yourself "Do we really need to care?" If it's only one user, in a very specific situation having problems, is it economically sound to "waste" time on it?

Answer 2

Ask your boss to buy you a 3G usb key to debug that ^^

Or you could ask the 3G users to set IE to show Javascript errors : http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/4009

then send you additionnal information (error message, file, line number, etc.)