Function

• IE, and other Web browsers, are designed to display a time-out message when it takes a prolonged amount of time to process a request, such as loading a page or script. Although the server that hosts the page that the visitor is trying to load may still be communicating with the browser, IE has no data to update or display and will eventually give up on the connection.
  
  

Identification

• Users can recognize a time-out in IE when they see one of the following error messages: "Microsoft Internet Explorer error 10060 connection timed out"; "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site <Web address>. The operation timed out"; or "The page cannot be displayed. Cannot find server or DNS Error."
  
  

Considerations

• The default time-out period varies between versions of IE. According to Microsoft, IE 4.0 and 4.01 have a time-out time of 5 minutes. However, more recent versions of the browser, including IE 5.0 through 8.0, have extended the waiting period to 60 minutes before the browser will display a time-out message.