Hello everyone,
I am having problems with Timers in a web application.
They just seem to stop running after 15 minutes or so.
My web application is set up like this:
When a user hits a page in the site, that page (.aspx)
instantiates a compiled class (.DLL). The instantiation
process creates a Timer that runs in the background to
perform tasks every so often (such as notifying clients
every 24 hours if something is overdue, etc.).
The problem seems to be that if the site goes idle, the
timer just dies after awhile. I've searched high and low
to find a solution for this, but can't seem to find any
answers. I have checked the processModel of my
machine.config and all of the timeout settings
are "Infinite".
So, just for fun, I built one of my timers to run every
minute and log some text to a file. That way I could
tell when it is aborting. I start up the application and
it prints a line every minute in the log, so I decide to
go to bed. I look at it in the morning to see that it
stopped after 18 lines in the log. I probably used the
site for about 3 minutes before going to bed, so I'm
assuming this is a 15 minute timeout.
Nothing in the timer code tells them to abort or
reschedule or anything. The only line of code for this
timer is to print the line to the log.
The only solution I have found that works is to use the
scheduler (this is a Windows 2000 server, by the way) in
the control panel. I have created a scheduled task to
run every 10 minutes that will open Internet Explorer and
hit my web site, therefore keeping it active (or starting
it back up if it went idle).
It seems like there should be a way to keep the timers
persistent for an infinite amount of time. Could it be
the garbage collector destroying an object reference? Is
it just the web application shutting down?
Oh, and as another note, the web application doesn't
*seem* to be shutting down entirely if it is shutting
down. I have my system set up so that when the first
instantiation occurs, a few logs are printed out. That
way I can see what's happening when the application
starts. Every time I change web.config or recompile my
DLLs, the application restarts (as it should) and I see
the new logs. However, when I leave my application
running overnight, then come in in the morning, the
application has not shut down because no "startup
messages" are appearing in my logs. Yet the timers are
dying still.
Sorry about the long-winded question, but I thought I
needed to provide a good amount of information.
I greatly appreciate any help someone can provide. Thank
you in advance for looking at this.
Hegg