MOSS Page Timeout Issues

So I was asked to write a simple webpart that would tally survey responses. Everything was moving along just fine and the code was behaving beautifully. Wouldn't you know it, once the code reached User Acceptance, issues started creeping along. I won't get into all the issues since most were minor. The one biggie was a timeout issue that appears as a nasty little default error message that reads "An unexpected error has occurred."

This was mind-boggling for me at first. How could my code fail after it passed unit testing and QA? Digging a little further, I copied masses of data over to my dev box and started debugging my code. Again, no problem while I was stepping through the code. But a funny thing happened when I switched my web.config settings on my dev machine from debug="true" to debug="false." The page threw this error at me. Finally, I was making head-way!

So I started stepping through the code once again, but nothing happened! How could this be? I thought my box was off debug mode? Turns out, when stepping through code, the box interprets those actions as having set debug="true" in web.config.

It finally dawned on me that the code was timing out. So I shut off debugger and added a new timeout setting to web.config. Presto! The code ran fine, but I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to apply my timeout setting to run only against that page. So I setup the web.config under my Layouts folder and wouldn't you know it, the issue appeared again. Now this was ridiculous, I should have the ability to set a path in MOSS to increase my timeout settings.

Turns out, I had to apply my setting in web.config at the root level. So under the home directory found in IIS (for most it would be c:\Inetpub\wwwroot), I updated web.config with the following under the configuration node and presto, my timeout setting applied only to my particular page url:

<location path="SomePath/MyPage.aspx">
<system.web>
<httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" />
</system.web>
</location>