Problem
Every once in a while one of my clients will ask me to change SharePoint’s timeout settings. It’s an easy change but you don’t make the adjustment in each web application’s web.config, instead the change is a global change made in the \LAYOUTS\ directory on each web server.
Solution
To update the execution timeout
- Login to each front end server
- Browse to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS
- Open web.config
- Locate the <httpRuntime executionTimeout="360" /> line of code and change the timeout value to one of your choice
- Repeat this change on each web server. Remember that if you host your central administration on another web server you might want to update that web.config as well because feature activation and other farm level settings have been known to timeout.
- When you are done the web.config should look something like this
Common Errors
If your changes don’t appear to stick, check each of your web application front end’s web.config usually located in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\%Application+Port%\ and look for the same executionTimeout variable under the <System.Web> section. You may also choose to add an entry directly under <System.Web>.
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