Why does my server "time out" when processing lots of bookings?
Every web server has a "time out" setting - a time after which a running process is automatically terminated if it's still running, in order to protect the server's resources. Typically, servers have this set to around 2-5 minutes - more than enough time for most operations!
If, however, you have a slow performing/heavily loaded server, and attempt to perform a very large task - such as modifying a vast number of bookings in one go, this has the potential to exceed your server's timeout period (although reports of such occurrences are extremely rare).
There are a number of ways you can combat this:
The easiest way is to simply reduce the amount of bookings you're attempting to add/modify/delete in a single action. For example, if you need to add a booking to every single calendar date for the next two years, and you find the operation "times out", consider splitting such operations into two, and add half the bookings at a time.
Reduce the number of "watch notifications" in use. For example, if a number of your users have set up "watch" triggers to receive email notifications whenever bookings are modified, and you then attempt to modify a large number of bookings in one go, MIDAS potentially has a lot of email notifications to send, which can slow down the overall speed/performance, especially if sending via a slow SMTP server/email gateway.
If you have access to your server's core configuration, consider increasing the server's timeout period as necessary.
Apache Timeout Setting
On Apache servers, the "Timeout" directive within the server's httpd.conf file is the setting you'll need to increase (the default is 60 seconds). Note that you'll need to restart Apache for changes to take effect.
IIS Timeout Setting
On IIS servers, add the following to your Web Config: <system.web> <httpRuntime executionTimeout="180"/> </system.web> (Where "180" is the desired timeout out in seconds. Note that you'll need to restart IIS for changes to take effect.)
Consider upgrading your server/network speed, or relocating MIDAS to its own server. Running MIDAS on its own server will mean that more server resources can be dedicated exclusively to your MIDAS system, and therefore traffic to the server and server resources won't have to be shared with other sites/applications.
Cloud-Hosted Customers: Requests to our servers will automatically timeout with an "Error 524" if running for more than 100 seconds. In the extremely unlikely event that you encounter this, please follow steps 1 and 2 above, or consider switching to a self-hosted edition of MIDAS.
