PRB: ASP Does Not Provide Progress Notifications to Client Browsers (243547)



The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft Active Server Pages, when used with:
    • Microsoft Internet Information Server

This article was previously published under Q243547

SYMPTOMS

Active Server Pages (ASP) does not provide a mechanism for notifying browser clients of progress while a long running task is executed on the server.

CAUSE

ASP is constrained by HTTP, which is inherently stateless and does not provide a mechanism for callback notifications.

RESOLUTION

Because ASP is executed procedurally and synchronously, avoid calling long-running methods or components that perform extensive work, directly from your ASP pages. Calling long-running methods or components negatively impacts performance and scalability of your Web server.

A common scalable solution is to hand off the request to Message Queue Server (MSMQ) and provide e-mail notifications to the client. In this scenario, the ASP page immediately returns a response to the client indicating success or failure and that the user will be notified by e-mail when processing is complete.

Modification Type:MajorLast Reviewed:10/23/2003
Keywords:kbEventService kbprb KB243547