About six months ago we transitioned from an in-house Exchange 2003 server to a hosted Exchange 2010 service.
For the most part this has worked well, but the providers OWA constantly times out. About 6/10 requests time out or more, and it's gotten to the point where OWA is just unusable. To give you an example: I'll login, read an email, choose reply and the window for replying gives me a request has timed out message. After a few attempts I'll get it to work and reply. After that I'll read another email and it'll timeout.
I contacted the provider about this and they said it's a known issue with Exchange 2010, for all providers, they're working with Microsoft to correct the issue, and there is no ETA.
To be clear this isn't a session issue. I don't have to login, it just says the request timed out and to try again. After a few attempts it does work. It's just extremely annoying.
I've spent a litte time researching the problem and I can't find anything that would suggest it's a common issue. Exchange 2010 has been around for a while, so I would suspect that if it was a huge problem it would have been corrected by now.
So is my provider full of crap, or is there really an issue that has yet to be corrected? If the issue does exist, is there any docs on it?
Your provider is full of crap. [Period]
I use OWA 2010 constantly, I have many customers that use it, and not one has ever experienced anything like this (on a consistent basis).
Yes, they are full of crap. I have experienced incredibly poor OWA performance on inappropriately provisioned servers, but on a server with enough beef it's fine. Maybe your server isn't up to the job, or your provider has over-allocated resources to multiple customers on that box.
I'd ask them to provide you with evidence this is a known problem, because you think they're pulling your leg. Depending how serious of an issue this is, you might want to ask for compensation and maybe even switch provider if it's causing you major issues.
To help the situation, if you haven't already, when you log in specify you're on a private computer and not a public one. This will increase your session timeout and prevent some costly operations from being performed on the backend every time you have to re-login (the default public setting ends your session after 5 minutes of activity). I've seen that help as a temporary fix until a server was upgraded.