The I/O operation has been aborted..

A couple of days ago I run into this PowerShell error while executing very lengthy operations remote script blocks.

The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

At first I suspected the stability of the session and I wanted to understand what caused the problem to refactor my code base.

While investigating the issue on [about_Remote_Troubleshooting] (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh847850.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396) and on Google, I kept reading about timeouts. I also read about the maximum memory size that the process of wsmprovhost.exe is allowed to consume.

I tried simulating these problems to determine the conditions that led to this error. So I tried, timeouts and terminating the process of wsmprovhost.exe in a variety of methods but in every case I could not get this error. Actually, PowerShell was amazing on trying to reconnect with warning messages.

Finally, I attempted a restart while a PowerShell block was executing remotely. Then I got this error.

It turns out that stopping the winrm service will cause exactly this error. The restart was just the trigger.

While investigating this issue, I watched what happens in the remote server while one or many script blocks are executed remotely on this server. I experimented with Invoke-Command using a computer name or just a session. In all cases, the process lifetime on the server matched what was happening on the client.