One of the famous server errors that you may get is Request time out. This error is normal for developers .The causes usually are a process that takes a very long time "lengthy operation" or a connection to a DB that is disconnected or a server side code that exexutes infinite loop. But what was very strange in MOSS 2007 that you may get a time out error from a data entry in the MOSS navigation.

Once a day I had been informed that my live site that is based on MOSS 2007 is down, then I found that the site gives a time out error. I spent about two day searching for the problem and eventually I found that the client submitts in the menu about 30 static links under the same node with the same title and URL.

The problem wasn't in the menu itself but it was in the site map data source.

We have ASP.Net SiteMapDataSource which is the data source for the share point menu. It seems that this problem is a bug in the integration between the datasource and MOSS. Because normally the sitemapdatasource throws an exception if the data provided contains duplicate URLS. so It is clear that MOSS can't handle this exception and throws time out error

Ahmed Abdel Hameed (MCSD .Net)