Classic ASP/Hanging when accessing db

[Melissa Johnson]

We have several classic asp pages that run on our website. Some of those pages connect to Access Databases. The website has run fine for many many years and we have made no changes to the database, server or the website code recently.
About a week ago, seemingly out of the blue, we started having issues with the website sporadically hanging at times. The pages that seem to be affected are the ones that access the db. The problem just seems to be getting worse to the point it is pretty much unusable.
We are running Windows Server 2003,SP2, IIS6 and Access 2003. Running the site in Firefox, I have seen this error:
Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'
Script timed out
The solutions they give for that error would not make sense for us since we have made no changes to the site and it was working fine before.
I have researched the issue and the only thing I found similar is this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;838306&Product=iis60
Since we have SP2 on the server this may not apply. We are stumped. Any advice on troubleshooting or what this could be is greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance, Melissa

[jhardman]

Melissa,

From my own personal experience I would guess that the real issue is poor error handling. Unfortunately, classic asp has no robust error handling built in. Go to one of the pages with the issue and search for a line with this text.

on error resume next

comment out this line (put an apostrophe at the beginning) and run it. This line was masking the real error and the page was trying to continue even though it had a significant error. Without this line it shouldn't hang at all, in fact you should see the real error very quickly.

Jared

[Melissa Johnson]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I did search and that line of code is not in any of the pages with the problems.

[jhardman]

Also check to see if they have any include files - the on error line might be there.

Jared

[Melissa Johnson]

Nope. No include files. This has just really been crazy. No rhyme or reason to it. Like I said, the code has not changed and it worked just fine until a week ago. I would think if it was something in the code, it would have happened before, but this website has been running since 2006 and we have never seen this before. It is just so flaky.

[jhardman]

The next thing to check for is loops - for, while, do. These are the most likely thing to drag on, because somehow they are looping forever.

Jared

[Melissa Johnson]

How do I know which loops are causing the problem? Is there a way to check them?

[jhardman]

Change one at a time to a numbered loop, maybe 5 or 10 times through to make sure the loop isn't repeating infinitely. The other thing I do for routine troubleshooting is put lots and lots of response.write comments in so you can tell how far you got (you might have to remove the response buffer) before the error.