Difference between executionTimeout and Server.ScriptTimeout

I have an aspx page which contains code that is liable to take 5 minutes or more to execute on the server. So I need to extend the amount of time before the Request times out.

What is the difference between putting this in the web.config for the site:

<location path="~/MyPage.aspx">
    <system.web>
      <httpRuntime executionTimeout="600"/>      
    </system.web>    
  </location>

and putting this in the code behind on the page:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Page.Server.ScriptTimeout = 600;
}

Solution

As for the executionTimeout setting for ASP.NET's <httpRuntime> configuration not work problem. The documentation on this attribute is really not very clear. The problem is caused by the following reasons:

This setting will take effect only when we set the "debug" to false in web.config, like:
```
<compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="false" />
```
when set to debug="true" mode, the runtime will ignore the timeout setting.
Even we set the debug="false", the executionTimeout will still has some delay when the value is very small. In fact, it is recommended that we don't set the timeout less than 1.5 minutes. And when we set the timeout to less than 1 minute, the delay will span from 5 secs up to 15 secs. For example, if we set executionTimeout="5", it may take about 15 seconds for the page to timeout.

The Server.ScriptTimeout property is a COM interface which is used in classic ASP. The executionTimeout of ASP.NET is the replacement of ScriptTimeout in ASP.NET, so we no longer need to use ScriptTimeout in ASP.NET.

In addition, as for having the script always terminate after 2 seconds, I'm afraid there is no means in ASP.NET's runtime setting. ASP.NET's runtime request processing management can't reach this level of accuracy; 2 seconds is too small a value which may make the performance very pool to monitor such a small interval.

If we do need to let a certain processing timeout, we can consider putting the timeout logic in the above application code level. For example, if we're executing SqlCommand, we can set the SqlCommand's execution timeout. Or if we are executing a async call in page code, we can set a timeout for the async call.