What effect will increasing Execution Timeout for SharePoint have on your environment ?

I was just off a call with Microsoft regarding a request from a project i am working on. The client wanted to increase the execution timeout (time it takes to return a http page before a timeout appears). They wanted to increase it as their reports were taking more than 2 minutes to run (2 Mins is the default timeout set by SharePoint). Once we did this (increased to 5 mins) in test environment the reports ran (taking about 3-4 mins to reurn results). The question then arose, what if they request this in Production environment, will it have an impact on the environment?

Microsoft responded with the following…… “As discussed, we don’t need to change the “execution timeout” value if we see that the SSRS reporting taking time to open. If we do that you may get the server performance issue since, if reporting service will take 4-5 min to process the report on your sharepoint server then their will a load on the server. Especially if we have more number of concurrent site users.”

COMMON CAUSES OF SLOW PAGE RETURNS:

–> If we have network issue between sharepoint and SQL server. Like: Duplicate Acknowledgements, TCP retransmissions and TCP out of order packets during communication.

or

–> If we are pulling up lot of reporting data using the Reporting services. We should try to redesign or changed the configuration.

How to Change the value ?

SharePoint uses a web.config located under:
Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

To set the default executionTimeout. The default executionTimeout (See Below) value is 120 seconds or 2 minutes. Increasing this value will allow our Feature code more time to complete execution before timing out.

Sample Web.Config

<system.web>
    <compilation batch=”false” batchTimeout=”600″ maxBatchSize=”10000″ maxBatchGeneratedFileSize=”10000″ />
    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb=”*” path=”*.aspx” type=”System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory, System.Web, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a” />
    </httpHandlers>
    <customErrors mode=”On” />
<httpRuntime executionTimeout=”360″ />
    <globalization fileEncoding=”utf-8″ />
  </system.web>