How to overcome Domino Webservice Timeout issues

Many of you might be aware of the restriction described here. I was not, and it caused me and my colleague quite some time to investigate, and fix this. Additionally, it caused us a lot of pain, because this issue increased the pressure on our project. So this might be relevant to some of you too...

So this is the story: We had a very annoying issue with a Domino WebService Consumer which was running in a timeout (almost all the time). As with many other projects the WebService was running fine in our Development environment. In both, our Integration as well as our Production Environment, the WebService always ran into the following error:

Error while reading data from server, Network operation did not complete 

in a reasonable amount of time; please retry

You have experienced this yourself too, don't you? Obviously, the amount of data in our development system was a lot smaller than in the integration and production environment. This is why the issue did not occur in our DEV system. But why the heck does the WebService stop at all??

After quite some research and opening a PMR we were pointed into te right direction:
The default Web Service Timeout is set to 60 seconds. It is a hard coded limitation, IBM seems not to be willing to fix this. To overcome the issue you have to be smarter than me and set the timeout on each WebService consumer individually at runtime. You can do this by calling the setTimeout() function of the WebService and pass the number of miliseconds.

More details can be  found in APAR LO48272: WEBSERIVCE CONSUMER BREAKS THE CONNECTION AFTER 60 SECONDS