Quick Tip: Adding properties to Members results in a timeout

There you are, working away on an Umbraco site with a large member base, and you need to add a new property. So off you go and add it to the member type... you click save.......

Execution Timeout Expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The statement has been terminated.

Not the message you want to see when saving a property on a member type, or performing a uSync import that does the same action!

Well, that is exactly what happened to me sigh.

So, after some googling, I was fortunate to come across this little twitter thread:

Getting sql timeouts on a #umbraco website when adding properties to a membertype. The site has a lot of members. Anybody experienced this ?

— Dave Woestenborghs (@dawoe21) May 27, 2021

And this helpful response:

We had this with 40k members. I think we ended up increasing the SQL timeout value in the connection string in the web.config - I think we added this to the end of the string
;Connection Timeout=300000

— Tristan Thompson (@TristanCoder) May 27, 2021

So that is exactly what I did, I extended the timeout on my connection string temporarily and boom member property added!

Note This blog entry is a quick tip, and over time may become outdated. There may also be better alternative solutions to the problem.