Okay, I'm having a very strange problem, and am looking for thoughts. The basic problem is that, when running a mass-import program, I am geting the following error message:

"The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding."

However, I do not believe this is a timeout problem.

The program is written in .NET 2010, runs under Windows 7, and accesses a Sql Server Express 2010 database on a remote server.

The import application is multi-threaded (10 threads), each processing 200 "policies" worth of data at a time. Each thread loads the data into a dataset, then saves the dataset to the database one table at a time. I also keep rather detailed log files for each thread, so I know what's going on.

There are about 70k "policies" worth of data. Processed in chunks of 200, that means the application saves to the database 350 different times... and only gets the timeout errors 6 times. The first timeout error occurs after 90 minutes of processing, and by that time the application has already saved almost 54,000 policies worth of data. Two threads show one timeout error, and two threads show two timeout errors... never in back-to-back batches. The rest work just fine.

I looked at the failures, and each and every one times out in less than a minute. On the other hand, I looked at two examples in the log file that SUCCESSFULLY saved data... but took an hour and 24 minutes to save.

If this were really a timeout issue, then why does the timeout fire in under a minute for those 6 occurrences, but saves taking over an hour work fine?

I'm looking for any and all opinions and thoughts, here.