.NET Remoting server side hanging

Question

We have a .net redirect application located between the web application and the database. Sometimes a strange problem arises. The remote call just hangs and never returns. We used packet sniffer to check traffic. This seems to be a server side issue. If we stop the server application, a network exception will be sent immediately. However, when we debug server code, it does not fall into any code. The request seems to be blocked somewhere inside the remote stacks. Does anyone have a similar experience?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem in .Net removal quite a while ago using IPC. I don’t remember all the features, so forgive me. The problem I discovered was that my client application was making a remote call to the server application, which took a long time (minutes) to complete. After you connected both the client and server to the debugger, and catching all the thrown exceptions, I found that the remote call actually ended up selecting an exception for the timeout (my memory wants to say that the internal message is connected to COM) since no activity occurred on the IPC channel during the wait period. Apparently, when these remote connections time out, links on both sides are essentially dead people. Oddly enough, I could only see this exception through the debugger - in release mode, my application just crashed, like yours, without any indication as to why. I found the timeout settings of the remote session and simply turned off the timeout (or made it ridiculously large, again I don’t remember exactly), which fixed the problem.

Answer 2

It turns out that the CMS we use also uses .NET Remoting, and it overwrites our security settings. We disabled the security settings of our remote application, and now everything works fine.