When you connect to a Web site that runs for a period of time before it returns information to Internet Explorer, you may receive one of the following error messages.

Message 1Message 2Message 3

The page cannot be displayed. Cannot find server or DNS Error.

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By design, Internet Explorer imposes a time-out limit for the server to return data. The time-out limit is five minutes for versions 4.0 and 4.01 and is 60 minutes for versions 5.x and 6. Also, the time-out limit is 30 seconds for Windows Internet Explorer 7. As a result, Internet Explorer does not wait endlessly for the server to come back with data when the server has a problem.

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In general, if a page does not return within a few minutes, many users perceive that a problem has occurred and stop the process. Therefore, design your server processes to return data within 5 minutes so that users do not have to wait for an extensive period of time.

You can usually break down long processes into smaller pieces, or the server can return status data to update users (and Internet Explorer) on the process status. In addition, you can create a long server process with a messages-based or asynchronous approach so that it returns immediately to the client after the job is submitted and notifies users when the long process is done.

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Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Although Microsoft does not encourage this approach, you can change the default time-out setting for Internet Explorer. To do this in Internet Explorer 4.01 Service Pack 1 or later, follow these steps:

1.	Add a ReceiveTimeout DWORD value with a data value of (<number of seconds>)*1000 in the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings For example, if you want the timeout duration to be 8 minutes, set the ReceiveTimeout data value to 480000 (<480>*1000).
2.	Restart your computer.

Note This setting does not work on versions of Internet Explorer that are before Internet Explorer 4.0 SP1.

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For more information about developing Web-based solutions for Microsoft Internet Explorer, visit the following Microsoft Web sites:

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