IIS 6 Timeouts – or not timing out – doesn’t timeout – the damn timeouts don’t work! February 26, 2008
Posted by scoopseven in IIS.add a comment
When IIS acts up, and won’t timeout requests. When IIS Tracer keeps saying Preproc Headers, and the requests pile up and never finish. When you’d love to kick IIS in the head because requests won’t time out. When IIS 6 requests don’t time out. (I tried really hard here people!) Check the IIS 6 Metabase. Make sure you’ve enabled IIS so that you can edit the MetaBase directly (It’s in /system32/inetsrv/MetaBase.xml) and check for these three line items.
HeaderWaitTimeout=”30″
ConnectionTimeout=”240″
MinFileBytesPerSec=”240″
The first two settings are in seconds. The third is explained by M$ as… “The time-out period is calculated by dividing the size of the entire response (including headers) by the value of the MinFileBytesPerSec property to obtain a maximum allowable response time, in seconds. For example, a 2-KB response (2,048 bytes) is allowed 8.5 seconds to complete if MinFileBytesPerSec has the default value of 240 bytes per second.” Great. More details on these settings can be found here.
Make sure you check these setting immediately as problems start to appear. I’ve had the MetaBase file revert back to defaults as a result of changing configurations in IIS, changing/editing application pools and who knows what else. Also, after these settings have been changed/edited/added in the MetaBase, reboot. They don’t seem to kill any already running requests or take effect unless the computer is rebooted.
XML Parsing Error IIS IE Firefox Coldfusion February 12, 2008
Posted by scoopseven in ColdFusion, IIS.add a comment
While loading a page in my browser, IE or FireFox, I kept getting this odd error message… “XML Parsing Error – Not Well Formed”. The odd thing was that I was loading a HMTL page, no XML. I tried changing the DocType tag, making my Javascript XML complaint (duh!) and I could not get this error to go away. I read something re: ASP causing the problem, so I disabled that in IIS, nothing. Turns out in a background process, I was calling a web service where the following code was used.
<cfheader name=”Content-Type” value=”text/xml; charset=utf-8″>
So CF had my browsers thinking that my non-XML / HTML page was in fact XML. Easy fix, I just added this tag as the first line in my HMTL page:
<cfheader name=”Content-Type” value=”text/html”>
And the world was right again 
