A few users of our ASP.NET app (recently updated to ASP.NET 4.0) have reported receiving page-hangs in Google Chrome – specifically the Chrome error:
This webpage is not available. Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.
The users state that other sites are just fine – it's just ours that is giving them trouble – and when they try other browsers with our app (e.g. FF/IE), those browsers are fine.
We of course questioned their installations of Chrome (version? / viruses?) – this is what all the Google Chrome forums speak of regarding this error and hangs.
We decided to do some testing of our own, and low-and-behold, we intermittently received the "Error 7" in hitting our production app under Windows 7 and the latest version of Chrome (no extensions installed).
At the precise moment that we received the error, we tried hitting the app with IE/FF – and they were fine.
Also, according to our analysis of our web logs, when we received the "Error 7", our web server (IIS 7.5 under Win 2008 R2, fully patched) did not receive the HTTP request from Chrome.
So to us, the mystery is why Chrome periodically cannot establish an HTTP connection to our web server – while other browsers have absolutely no trouble.
I know that this is a nebulous scenario, which we cannot consistently reproduce. But if anyone has some thoughts as to what we could look into – or some further tests that we could try, this would sure be appreciated.
UPDATE:
In our testing, the issue seems to be greatly remedied by going (in Chrome) to Options > Under the Hood > Network > Change proxy settings… > LAN settings, and ensuring that "Automatically detect settings" is not selected. This solution was found on one of the Google forums.
Best Answer
That's a strange one. You may need to check before IIS using a tool like Wireshark. I had a fairly similar issue recently although it wasn't browser based. Our Broadcom network adapters were dropping some packets under heavy load as soon as it arrived on the server. I had to use Wireshark to prove that the requests were dropped right at the network card. A driver update mostly fixed the issue although we eventually swapped out the NIC completely.
Check any firewall IPS policies too in case they don't like the Chrome browser agent for some reason.