Web service call with Query Ajax hangs.

Question

Before I start posting a ton of code I think I may be able to explain my situation more logically. I have eight drop downs on a page being populated in exactly the same way except they are using different stored procs. The ones that return a LOT of rows (around 44000 but each rows is only about an average of 5 characters) are the ones that don't work.

I am using a web service calls to get the data. The service calls are being called with JQuery ajax.

The calls when run directly in SSMS take about 2 seconds to run. When less records are returned everything works. So it's not a problem with the code logic, its an issue with the number of records.

I know it's not a good idea to populate anything with this many records but this number of records is only returned in rare cases and I would rather not catch and avoid this situation, I would rather the program just run correctly.

Is there some reason that these calls just hang? I have

<httpRuntime  executionTimeout="10000" maxRequestLength="3048576" />

It seems to me that while it may be slow, or not great idea, that it should still be possible!

I'll post my code if need be.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Its not clear why the request just hangs. Do you have some kind of error message? If not then it might be worth using Firebug to take a look at the response from the server, the Ajax calls should appear in the Console tab (make sure you have Show XMLHttpRequests set on) and you should be able to drill down into the response for the failing requests from there.

Looks like you have set the ASP.NET timeout. It may be that there is a separate IIS timeout coming into play here, but I'm only guessing here.

The only thing I would add is that if you are using ASP.NET Web services to fetch the data, when dealing with large responses the time taken to serialize the response to XML may be significant so even if the database query runs in 2 seconds it could take the server a lot longer to return that data through the Web service. And it will then take a significant amount of time for the browser to deserialize it.