I have a web app that my customers use to enter bug reports. One user today had trouble entering his report because the web app kept quitting on him. The app’s Timeout property is set to 120, which should be plenty.
He got this message from the app:
Trouble evaluating response: Invalid character
Source: 408 Request Timeout
Request Timeout
This request takes too long to process, it is timed out by the server. If it should not be timed out, please contact administrator of this web site to increase 'Connection Timeout'.
I’m wondering what the “invalid character” might be, and if that is indeed the problem, how to code around it? Also, what determines the “connection timeout”? Is that more likely a property of the database the app uses to store the data? Is this the kind of message that’s likely to appear if the DB is slow to respond?
It’s hard to puzzle this out with so little information…
The “invalid character” is a bit of a red herring, it just means the wrong stuff came back, such as a bunch of unexpected html complaining about a timeout.
I kept having the same problem with that error message popping up. Especially when the application would quit for some reason then restart. I made a few changes to both my web app and the database server which seems to have corrected the problem. Seems that the database connections were not closing when the sessions closed and would remain open for long periods of time before the database would close the connections. Not sure if your having the same issue but might be worth looking at.
1: Make sure that database connections close on the session close event.
2: increase your database connection timeout to compensate for database server bottlenecks.
3: increase your maximum connections on your database server. (db.close in the close session does not always close the database connection)
