Question: I saw this quote in [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/221716/most-large-companies-prefer-wisa-over-lamp-why):

> 
> MS support is poor, except when you've
>  paid for a support contract... then
>  its very very good. – gbjbaanb 
> 
> 
> 

This got me thinking. My company has had 2 support incidents with Microsoft a few months ago (before Stack Overflow was live). In both cases, we were pushing the limits of the SharePoint system we were building, and the API did not expose events to let us know when operations were completed. Both times, Microsoft's response was to tell us to add a `Thread.Sleep()` call and just wait for the operation to finish.

Now, I am all for the community working together to answer questions, but sometimes there just aren't answers to your question available online.

For the times when you can't find an answer, has paid support been worth it to you?

If you have had success with Microsoft paid support, please share what type of problem it was. I am trying to understand exactly what to expect from a support incident.

Answer: 
I too have had a good experience, but as with some of the others I will say that you have to escalate the issue typically to get resolution. Once you do though, they follow-through very well, and provided detailed assistance.
Yes, I have had an opportunity to use paid support from Microsoft. I was working for a dot-com and we were having intermittent crashes on our main site which used ASP. I had been asked to run this utility to generate a crash dump when the error popped up on the site and had sent a few in to be analyzed. The analysis suggested that the number of string concatenations being done in the code was a potential issue as this was causing the memory to fragment and that led to the issue as the code had hundreds of concatenations, sometimes where the code didn't even need to do it, e.g. in a line there would be " blah blah blah " & " more more more" where the & is unnecessary and causing part of the issue, as well as suggesting that a string array may be better for handling taking string after string to build part of the response for some pages.