Portal system very slow

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.