Running select affects performance of stored procedure called from code In what scenario would running the same select statement in SSMS as that in a stored SP which is currently timing out start making the SP (which is being called from a service every minute (30 sec timeout)) start working?

The select in SSMS doesn't return any results and can be canceled after 60 seconds. At which point the previous failing SP is now returning results. If you run the select while the SP is being called from code it takes about 2 seconds to run.

No parameters are passed into select, there is a join to a busy event table.

To sum I'm looking for explanation as to how running one select can affect (for the better) another select.
You would have to do some digging but one way I can imagine is the SELECT is pulling data pages into cache from disk and subsequent SP runs are just getting their data straight from the buffer pool without having to hit disk.