Scope Timeouts

I had an instance recently where a scope in an orchestration would timeout pretty much instantly despite having a timeout period of 10 seconds. This was a real head-scratcher and I couldn't see where the issue was.

After discussing with a colleague we stumbled upon a difference in the clock time between the application server (where the orchestration runs) and the biztalk message box server. The time difference was almost 10 seconds leading to the "inst ant" timeout. A quick look in the event log indicated a problem with the NTP service and the domain controller (another story!) causing the system time to drift out. Correcting the clock fixed my timeout problem.