Data Access and Transactions

Tip 2: Set the Connection Time-Out

Limit the amount of time your application waits before abandoning a connection attempt and issuing an error message.

A database server experiencing a sudden increase in activity can become backlogged, which greatly increases the time required to establish a database connection. Excessive connection delays increase the time that users wait to find out that requests cannot be processed.

By changing the Connection object’s ConnectionTimeout property, you can reduce the time it takes for a connection to time out. Not all providers support this property, but it can dramatically increase the perceived responsiveness of those that do. The default for the ConnectionTimeout property is 30 seconds.

The following script sets the ConnectionTimeout property to wait 20 seconds before canceling the connection attempt:

Set cn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
cn.ConnectionTimeout = 20
cn.Open "FILEDSN=MyDatabase.dsn"