Hi All,

Many of our staff using SPSS 25 (have not seen this on other versions) have recently started getting what appears to be timeout errors.

Common scenario would go something like this. Staff member is working on a dataset, stops to write an email for 5 minutes or so, comes back and receives the error File Read Error: File name (etc etc) Invalid: Argument (DATA1003). On our end it appears the connection to the file (Hosted on a windows file server) has been dropped.

I have been all over the server settings, and can't find any timeout setting short enough to be causing this. Is there a setting in SPSS 25 that could be causing it, or is there a known fix for this?

This is probably a network connection error. I have seen this in multiple versions of SPSS, although it doesn't happen for me in such a short period of time. Hibernating or Sleep mode may cause this, too. So, I think it is most likely that your file server is responsible. This might happen for a data file that is frequently reread as well as for scratch files (the virtual active file) that would probably also be on the server.

Of course, copying the data file(s) locally should prevent it, but I don't think that there is anything that SPSS can do about this. You might be able to mitigate the problem by using the SPSS CACHE command, which would pull the data locally, but I don't know what would happen if you resaved the data on the server. See the CACHE description in the Command Syntax Reference for details.