: Does Internet Explorer 'timeout'? Within my website I have a single page that dynamically updates via AJAX / JSON in a plain HTML page. Now this page may be left open for up to three or

@Dunderdale272

Many questions come to mine:


What version of IE?
What was the code that was making the call?
What did the browser do when you came back to it a few days later?
What do your webserver logs indicate -- were there returns from the webserver with error codes that the JavaScript was incapable of handling?


Generally, if you have a piece of JavaScript code that is being executed on a timer with setTimeout it will run forever. But remember that browsers are desktop software and as such, sometimes stuff happens to the system which can impact that browser. It's difficult to speculate without knowing more precisely what the conditions of your experience were. It's possible the browser did freeze up because of some other system software running. It's possible that the DNS of the system went kerflooie for a little while, and then the JavaScript did not handle that problem well. It's possible the server serving the content crapped out for a second and returned an incorrect string that your JavaScript could not handle, then, page execution stopped. Lastly, maybe the browser transiently ran out of memory? If the returned data also added content that added events to the page, maybe you simply ran out of memory? This would be the case if the page truly "froze" - but you likely would have seen a memory alert from IE in that case.

Lots of ins and outs for this question, and not enough details supplied.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Speyer207

I would not expect IE to time out but if a ajax request has failed and it may not attempted to try again. A good way to confirm this would be to use Firefox and download a plug-in called FireBug. This will give you a log of all http/ajax requests that are requested from the desktop and will show you if it received any error states back from the server or a javascript error.

Vote Up Vote Down