ASP.NET AJAX Timer Trouble? Location is key.
AJAX, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Performance By Dave Ward on September 19th, 2007If you’ve made much use of the ASP.NET AJAX Timer control, you may have noticed that it can behave somewhat unexpectedly. In this post, I’m going to take a closer look at how the Timer works and the most significant factor that influences it: Location.
Where the timer is placed on the page actually varies how it operates. As a Timer’s delay interval approaches the processing time of its resulting PostBack, the difference that the Timer’s location makes becomes very significant.

This is a technique that I really like. It’s excellently suited to intranet sites and administrative interfaces, where your users are typically familiar enough with the application to know which text they can click to edit. It’s actually very easy to implement, with a small amount of JavaScript.