Intermittent Failure to respond

[Shinz62]

I have a dot net windows client, calling a dot net web service on a timer.
Every once in a while the web service fails to respond causing my client to
get a timeout. This is especially painful on the client side because when the
failure occurs it causes the client to hang, waiting for the reply that never
comes, until the timeout is triggered.

I did some monitoring with a sniffer and found out that actually the web
service does respond but it responds differently on occasion. The difference
seems to be that sometimes the client was in the middle of doing a keep alive
exchange with the server when the application call is made. The result is
that the server responds with an ACK rather than an OK at the end of the
application call and this causes the client to not understand the reply.

I don't have any easy way to reproduce this problem, it usually occures only
after the app has been running for 20-30 minutes and this makes it especially
difficult to track.

Any suggestions?

[Shinz62]

---this is my repost under a supported user id ---
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I have a dot net windows client, calling a dot net web service on a timer.
Every once in a while the web service fails to respond causing my client to
get a timeout. This is especially painful on the client side because when the
failure occurs it causes the client to hang, waiting for the reply that never
comes, until the timeout is triggered.

I did some monitoring with a sniffer and found out that actually the web
service does respond but it responds differently on occasion. The difference
seems to be that sometimes the client was in the middle of doing a keep alive
exchange with the server when the application call is made. The result is
that the server responds with an ACK rather than an OK at the end of the
application call and this causes the client to not understand the reply.

I don't have any easy way to reproduce this problem, it usually occures only
after the app has been running for 20-30 minutes and this makes it especially
difficult to track.

Any suggestions?