Original User: rlwatson
Jamal, there is no easy answer to this question. The ESRI client code is waiting for some amount of time for a response and then gives up. The thing is that they don't want to hang the system if server does not respond but they also have no idea whether it will ever respond. This is a classic problem for which there is no solution.
So, the real question is why is server taking so long? The obvious things to do are to look in the ArcGIS Server Manager log to see if there are problems which are being reported. If there is nothing there then it could be that server has insufficient resources (RAM, CPU, etc.) to respond in a reasonable amount of time. It could also be a database or network problem. The thing that you have to find is the weakest link.
Last week I was working on ArcGIS Server and one day it became noticeably slower. I asked DBA about it and he had, for various reasons, lowered the amount of physical RAM allocated to the VM which was hosting Oracle.
Sorry that I don't have a better answer for you:(