Thread

I’m working with an organization that had been using EE 1.6.8 until we made the leap to 2.x last October.  Since then, they’ve had intermittent speed issues with their control panel, primarily from within their building—ranging from 10-20 seconds to load a CP page to, at times, a complete timeout—even when just trying to log in.  According to their IT admin and those responsible for updating the site, all of these slowdowns started right around when we upgraded and often times once the user has logged in, things seem to speed up.

I’ve never really had to deal with proxy servers, so I’m not sure what to tell him—I’m out of my comfort zone.  Does anyone know if there have been changes with the way EE would interact with a proxy from 1.6.x to 2.1.x? 

Here is the basic rundown of their proxy—directly from the IT Manager:

We are using Trend Micro Interscan Web Security Suite 3.1
I am not using IntelliTunnel scanning
I am not using HTTP or FTP scanning
The only thing I have it set up to do is URL Filtering. This is pretty basic. You only check categories to block.
We are using as a firewall, Sonicwall 2040 Enhanced. Perhaps there could be a setting in there that could be slowing things down as well.

We are using version 2.1.3, build 20101220 with only one extension - MXCloner.  Host (unfortunately): GoDaddy.

Thanks in advance for any insight…

-phil

Hi, phil.

I’ll ask the dev team for assistance on this one - I don’t have any direct experience with proxies either. But I can tell you that being on Godaddy isn’t helping any. Thanks in advance for your patience.

Thanks for your help Sue - I’ll stay tuned.  Interestingly when they installed IE6 behind the proxy this morning, things sped right along. IE8/FF still having issues.

From Brandon: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12250946

This is something he found when searching for Sonicwall 2040 Enhanced. Doesn’t have to do with EE per se.. but there ya go.

Thanks for the help Sue—I forwarded this along, but I’m not sure it has much to do with what we’re dealing with.  For what it’s worth, if instead of logging into the panel using http://www.site.com/system
We use the redirected link:
http://www.site.com/system/index.php?S=0&D=cp&C=login&M=login_form  things move right along…
So it’s something in the redirect that’s clogging up the works…

- phil

One thing you can do to speed things up is to turn off new version checking. HowTo Turn of New Version Checking

Are you using cookies only or cookies and sessions for the admin session type?

Sue,

I read several posts about the issues with new version tracking a while back and disabled it some time ago.  Our admin/front-end settings are both “Cookies Only.”  However, I could see where some other setting here might be responsible for slowing things down. Do you have any suggestions on things to try?

(See screenshot)

P.S.  The IT admin basically completely opened up the proxy yesterday and they were still having the slowdown, but things were much speedier if he entered the full URL as I documented above.

So it’s something in the redirect that’s clogging up the works…

That’s interesting. Some URL filtering, perhaps? You mention that in your first posting, can this be disabled for testing, perhaps? What about mod_security or anything like that?

columbusphil, can you also verify that the slowness is NOT happening when off site? I just want to rule out that the host did something around the same time period that is in fact making it slow everywhere.

Thanks.

Marcus, Ingmar,

The slow downs only occur when on-site. If we go to the login screen—it takes anywhere from 2-4 minutes, UNLESS we use the redirected URL specified in the post above, then the page renders right away.

However….

Upon login, same thing—it takes about 3-4 minutes to load the control panel. However, once we get to the control panel, everything works fine.

If we disable the proxy server, everything speeds right up.  The IT admin allowed me to take a look at the URL filtering policies and everything is filtered by category, but exceptions can be specified.  Naturally, we’ve specified our domain.  There is no speed delay when rendering the front-end.

I’ll throw this out there—they are unable to resolve their domain name http://uproducers.com  from within the building (just http://www.uproducers.com)—(I’m assuming a firewall issue), but I can access the domain from outisde.  Finally, I don’t think it does—but does EE utilize any ActiveX or Applets?  The proxy also filters for these…

INGMAR: I will ask the IT admin to disable all url filtering and see what happens. 

Thanks for any help,

- Phil

Sorry one more update… but should this be specified in our case or is this just for reverse proxies? 

$config[‘proxy_ips’]

http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/general/hidden_configuration_variables.html#proxy_ips

I believe it’s just for reverse proxies.

Are they using the www anywhere in the control panel?

Hi Sue,

Yes “www” is specified under “General Config”

- “URL to your control panel index page”
- “URL to the root directory of your site”
- “URL to your themes folder”

- Phil

UPDATE: Disabling URL filtering has no effect - the proxy must be disabled completely for the slowdowns to disappear.

Phil, we’ll continue to look into this internally, but it really looks like the proxy is the culprit here. Please let us know if you find anything else.

Ingmar,

Don’t waste your time or resources if you don’t know anything right off the bat.  EE is fine - there’s just something with the proxy that it doesn’t like with the new version.  Just wanted to see if you guys had some pointers to resolve it/things that have changed that might cause issues.  Thanks anyway—I appreciate your continued support.

- Phil