Many questions come to mine:
- What version of IE?
- What was the code that was making the call?
- What did the browser do when you came back to it a few days later?
- What do your webserver logs indicate -- were there returns from the webserver with error codes that the JavaScript was incapable of handling?
Generally, if you have a piece of JavaScript code that is being executed on a timer with setTimeout
it will run forever. But remember that browsers are desktop software and as such, sometimes stuff happens to the system which can impact that browser. It's difficult to speculate without knowing more precisely what the conditions of your experience were. It's possible the browser did freeze up because of some other system software running. It's possible that the DNS of the system went kerflooie for a little while, and then the JavaScript did not handle that problem well. It's possible the server serving the content crapped out for a second and returned an incorrect string that your JavaScript could not handle, then, page execution stopped. Lastly, maybe the browser transiently ran out of memory? If the returned data also added content that added events to the page, maybe you simply ran out of memory? This would be the case if the page truly "froze" - but you likely would have seen a memory alert from IE in that case.
Lots of ins and outs for this question, and not enough details supplied.