ASP.NET long running task. Thread is being aborted exception

Question

An ASP.NET 3.5 webapp has to start several tasks that takes hours to complete. For obvious reasons the pages which starts these tasks cannot wait for them to finish nor will

Answer 1

Chances are you can get this working, by upping the timeout, using a different app pool or a variety of other hacks, but your best bet is going to be to decouple the long running task from the ui and asp.net completely, and use either a service (wouldn't recommend it) or a scheduled task that polls for work to do; personally I would use something like aws sqs/sns to keep track of work to be done and a scheduled task in windows server that checks for things todo at whatever frequency make sense. The only thing the ui/asp.net then needs to do is log that fact that something needs to be done, not actually do it.

Another benefit of this message based approach is should the long running process become so long running, or so overworked, you'd have the opportunity to add more worker tasks or servers to complete those requests.

Perhaps more than you can implement for your immediate problem, but something to consider for a better long term solution.

Answer 2

You can start the long-running process in its own application domain.

In the past, when I've needed this capability, I create a Windows Service for this purpose. If you use WCF to connect to it, it doesn't even have to run on the IIS machine at all; you can run it on any machine on the network.