Whilst upgrading a solution from 7.0 to 7.1 in pre-production I got the following timeout exception.

Of course the first thing I did was set the timeout value of the httpRuntime to a massive number in the hope that this would fix the issue., but it didn’t 😦

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="512000" executionTimeout="6000000" enableKernelOutputCache="false" />

The problem is with IIS application pool setting “Ping Maximum Response Time” which is the time in seconds the worker process is given to respond to health monitoring ping. After 5 missed responses the work process is timed out and causes the afore mentioned exception

There are 2 solutions:

1. Set ping enabled to false
2. Set the Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds) to a large value

Of course remember to reset these values after you have upgraded.

I have to give the credit and say thanks to Marina from Sitecore support, as Marina identified this issue 🙂