Why does this transport-level error occur?

Question

After a breakdown on my virtual webhost, they finally restored the container, but now I randomly get the error when I try to execute queries. I can do a

Select top 20000 from Orders

But

Select * from Orders (about 100k rows total)

Receives the error in my management studio:

A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: Shared Memory Provider, error: 0 - No process is on the other end of the pipe.)

And this error in my error log:

A read operation on a large object failed while sending data to the client. A common cause for this is if the application is running in READ UNCOMMITTED isolation level. This connection will be terminated.

I have googled the error and can see that it could be because "Lightweight pooling" is enabled, but this is not the case here.

I run mssql 2008 express on a windows 2003 server.

Answer 1

We get the same random issue on MSSQL where I work and (for us any way) its down to network issues (too much traffic and such).

Answer 2

This blog post by Michael Aspengren explains the error message "A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server."