LMS Timeouts - Captivate 4

I have a client who is having problems with a lesson timing out. It was built in Captivate 4 (before I started the company) and drops the connection to the server after a certain amount of idle time. This loses the tracking which is obviously a huge problem especially considering it takes hours for our customers to go through the lesson. It's 'a biggie'.
I was reading that there are some other development tools (that will remain nameless)  that actually ping the server at set intervals to ensure there are no timeouts. Does anyone know if this feature is in Captivate 5 +? Any idea if this is strictly a server issue? Any thoughts are welcome.
Many thanks in advance for sharing...
Best, Steve

I'm not sure where this stands with the latest versions of Captivate, but for versions 3 and 4, I'm pretty sure CP would send it's stored ('suspend') data to the LMS on a timed basis - like every 7 seconds or something. So if it's a big course and a lot of data is being recorded...the further the user gets into the course, and the more data CP sends (it sends the full 'suspend_data' string)...
So I could see a situation where after several minutes, the suspend_data value has grown very large, and it isn't able to send the full string before the LMS times-out waiting for the data...and/or before 7 seconds elapses and it tries to send the data again...
SO perhaps an 'easy fix' is to select the preference that says 'never send resume data'. That should prevent the CP lesson from sending the suspend_data to the LMS. The downside of that is then that the lesson/LMS has no way to resume (ie bookmark) the lesson. So if a user goes halfway through and closes the lesson, then relaunches it later, the lesson starts over.
BUT that at least may be a way to troubleshoot the issue and see if that prevents the timeout from occuring.
IF that seems to work then you can first try to re-enable resume data (uncheck 'never send resume data') but reduce the amount of information it contains by selecting just 'Report Score' instead of 'Interactions and Score' under the Reporting Level section of the project preferences...
Of course, if that section is already set to just 'Report Score' then that doesn't help much...
...in which case, if you still have the problem and just 'Report Score' is selected and you need to have bookmarking (resume data) then the only option is likely to split the lesson into more manageable bits...
...or increase the LMS response timeout on the server, or increase the bandwidth between the user and the LMS...(!)
HTH
Erik

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