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Saba_007_140621's avatar
Saba_007_140621
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jun 26, 2014

Portal system very slow

Hello !

 

We have our SAP Portal system being accessed via the F5 load balancer. All of a sudden, the link has become extremely slow.

 

Packet captures taken while accessing the Portal (via the F5), show errors being thrown from the application. We also see errors like TCP window full.

 

However, when we access the Portal directly (bypassing the F5), all is well & there are no issues whatsoever. On the SAP side, there are no errors etc. in the logs as well...

 

We've restarted the F5 box too...but the issue persists...

 

Please can you help advise anything we could look at to obtain some clue as to what's amiss.......

 

Thanks a lot ! saba.

 

8 Replies

  • PeteWhite's avatar
    PeteWhite
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Jun 26, 2014

    You will need to be much more explicit here - what do you mean by "errors being thrown from the application"? Do you mean TCP Resets? I have seen issues like this where the server performs redirects and causes issues.

     

    My suggestion is to capture a session with a single client on both the client and server side of the f5, check for resets, redirects, 404s, etc. You can use the tcpdump and ssldump commands ( use -p with tcpdump if you have recent software )

     

  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Jun 26, 2014

    If I may add, do a client side capture with a tool like Fiddler or HTTPWatch. Do this for portal-based and direct access and then compare the two. What you're most likely going to want to look for is a) time between requests/responses, and b) response sizes. I've actually seen similar issues where very large files (in my case js files) were taking a long time to get to the client, specifically because the portal was configured to parse JavaScript. I had to write an iRule to bypass the rewrite engine for specific js files.

     

  • Saba_007_140621's avatar
    Saba_007_140621
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 26, 2014

    Thanks Pete...we'll definitely try the tcpdump...

     

    Kevin, we've used the HTTPWatch & the trace (using the F5) shows that portal screen content (images, .jsp themes etc.) are downloading very slowly if the F5 is used. The login page too takes ages to load.....

     

    Also, this issue has surfaced all of a sudden without any F5 changes...

     

    Thank you so much for the super quick help... saba.

     

  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Jun 26, 2014

    You need to look at the specific (overall) times for each request/response. You may find that some take much more time than others, and are perhaps also considerably larger files. Given that the portal is going to natively rewrite HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and potentially also Flash and Java, these are the requests that you should look for. Also consider that JavaScript loading is generally a blocking action, so a large js file, made slower by the portal patching engine, is going to cause the page to load more slowly.

     

  • Saba_007_140621's avatar
    Saba_007_140621
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 27, 2014

    Thank you so much for the help !!!

     

    We had to finally disable logging on the F5 to sort this out...

     

  • Saba_007_140621's avatar
    Saba_007_140621
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 29, 2014

    Hi Kevin,

     

    Yes...we'd raised a ticket with F5 support... They helped us disable logging & change the protocol to UDP from TCP.

     

    It worked like magic for us :)

     

    Hope it helps others too :)

     

    Thanks a lot !