How to Sleep in ASP using ADO

Here is a cheesy method I found for temporarily pausing execution in Active Server Pages (ASP) by abusing ADO and timeouts. None of this would be necessary if ASP, like WScript, simply had a Sleep() method.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• ASP Knowledge

1. Create an instance of "ADODB.Connection".
2. Set the ConnectionTimeout of the ADODB.Connection object to the amount of time you want to sleep in seconds.
3. Construct a connection string to a specific IP address rather than using a data source name (DSN). This should be pointing to a non-existant server and leave out the authentication information since it won't be necessary. I recommend pointing it locally (127.0.0.1) so you don't increase packet traffic on the network. Example string: "driver={sql server};server=127.0.0.1".
4. Call the Open() method with the connection string you made, but catch and ignore the exception thrown by it. If you're using VBScript you can use the horrific "ON ERROR RESUME NEXT", but remember to reset error handling afterwards.
5. You're done, that part of the code will cause configurable delay in your ASP.

Tips & Warnings

• Subtracing 1 second from the ConnectionTimeout value set will generally get you closer to the mark.
• Put this into a function (CheesySleep ?) so you can re-use it and replace it when you have a better way of doing it.
• Just like your mama always said, putting sleeps in code is generally bad, but sometimes it just can't be avoided. At least this technique doesn't just spin on a loop checking the time (and thereby eat up all the CPU).
• Seconds are not very granular.
• Resulting sleep time is never exact; consider the ConnectionTimeout more of a "minimum" amount of time to wait ... you WILL be waiting longer.
• I haven't fully tested if this results in BLOCKING other ASP requests or not.