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Hi,

I have a ASP.NET application where I have added a Webservice that contains a "fire and forget" method. When this method is executed it will start a loop (0-99999) and for every loop it will read a xml file and save it to the database.

The problem is that this action will take a couple of hours and it usually ends with a Thread Aborted exception?

I have seen that you can increase the executionTimeout and this is how :

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="604800"/>
<compilation debug="true">

But this does not help?

I have also tried to add a thread.sleep within the loop. If I set it to 500 it will go half way and if I set <100 it will just go a couple of 1000 loops before the thread aborted exception?

How can I solve this?

Is there a way to refactor the long running process from the web service? — rcravens, Dec 27 '10 at 14:21

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 27 '10 at 14:17

Don't run the loop inside the web service. Instead, have it in a console app, a winforms app, or possibly even a windows service. Use the web service to start up the other program.

A web service is basically a web page, and asp.net web pages are not meant to host long running processes.

This article does not directly answer your question, but contains a snippet of info relevant to my answer:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd296718.aspx

However, when the duration of the operation grows longer than the typical ASP.NET session duration (20 minutes) or requires multiple actors (as in my hiring example), ASP.NET does not offer sufficient support. You may recall that the ASP.NET worker processes automatically shut down on idle and periodically recycle themselves. This will cause big problems for long-running operations, as state held within those processes will be lost.

and the article is a good read, at any rate. It may offer ideas for you.

Sorry but my Web hotel do not allow this. – Banshee Jan 02 '11 at 17:12 — Banshee, Jan 02 '11 at 17:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 27 '10 at 14:20

0

Not sure if this is 'the answer', but when you receive the web service call you could consider dispatching the action onto another thread. That could then run until completion. You would want to consider how you ensure that someone doesn't kick off two of these processes simultaneously though.

answered Dec 27 '10 at 14:20

Egwor

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Will this really work? The new thread should be handled the same way and be teminated? – Banshee Jan 02 '11 at 17:13

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 27 '10 at 14:20

I have a ASP.NET application where I have added a Webservice that contains a "fire and forget" method. When this method is executed it will start a loop (0-99999) and for every loop it will read a xml file and save it to the database.

Lets not go into that I fhind this approach quite... hm... bad for many reasons (like a mid of the thing reset). I would queue the request, then return, and have a queue listener do the processing with transactional integrity.

Anyhow, what you CAN do is:

Queue a WorkItem for a wpool thread to pick things up.
Return immediately.

Besides that, web services and stuff like this are not a good place for hourly long running processes. Tick off a workflow, handle it separately.

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