Should I just let the user hang?

Question

Hi

I am not really sure what to do in this situation. I have some jquery ui 1.7 tabs that are ajax enabled. Now when a tab is clicked it goes to my asp.net mvc controller action method. That then does whatever is needed and return a partial view.

Now I don't know why but sometimes my server hangs but then again I am guessing all servers hang since sometimes when I go to sites it take forever to load but if you do a refresh it loads up instantly and that's the same case with my site.

My site will load up a tab super fast for X number of times then all of a sudden a request will just hang and maybe like 15seconds later it will load up. Or if you just refresh the page it will go back and start loading them up super fast again.

The problem though is the request is sent to the server where it hangs. So I tried to setup a jquery timeout on all my ajax stuff and that calls an abort to the jquery ui tabs.

But it never works and I guess from what I gathered reading on this site is because the request is on the server and abort won't stop stuff on the server. So if I look at firebug that request that hanged is stil running.

Now this causes a huge problem for me since it screws up the entire page what is heavily ajax. Like if the user tries to click on say another tab they will most likely have to click 2 times to get it to load up. Another thing what happens is if that request ever finish hanging whatever tab they are on will merge with that tab. So sometimes one tab will have parts from all the other tabs.

So if it hangs and does not finish it really messes with the ajax tabs. I have no clue how to fix this.

So I am not sure what to do.

Let them hang for however long it takes the server to figure out how to finish that request(when a ajax request is made I disable all tabs. This is because if a person say loaded up a tab and did not let it finish and tried to go to another tab the same problem would occur with the tabs merging together). Or abort the request and have a screwed up tabs.

Great choices I got. Anyone got any better choices?

Thanks

Answer 1

We've had good success using jquery queue manager - http://www.protofunc.com/scripts/jquery/ajaxManager/

When a second request is performed it aborts the first request. I'm not sure about a timeout, but there are several options you can play with.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what you mean by "jquery timeout". if you mean setTimeout, that definately won't work. If you mean, on the other hand,

$.ajax({
     url:"myserverprocess", 
     timeout: 200, 
     error: function () { /* try again */ }, 
     success: function (myadata) { alert("mydata")}
});

then that should work. Try the timeout option if you haven't yet.

edit: you could try :

$(selector).tabs({
    ajaxOptions: {
        url:"myserverprocess", 
        timeout: 200, 
        error: function () { /* try again */ }, 
        success: function (myadata) { alert("mydata")}
    }
});

Answer 3

You could use Jquery to set a timeout on your ajax call and then catch it in the error section. Once caught, you could deal with retrying or doing any needed cleanup.

Answer 4

We have a similar situation here in that the 1st person to hit the site for the day will incure a 15 second delay while things are loaded.

In our situation, on all calls to the server via jQuery, I have set a normal javascript timeout for 2 seconds. After 2 seconds I pop up a small div saying something like things are talking longer than expected and please be patient.

after a further 6 seconds i close that div and open a new one with more of an apology.

not a great solution but it does keep the user in the loop, comfortable that things are ticking along and that we acknowledge things are not perfect.

warm and fuzzies as we call them here. :)