We have run into some very strange performance problems with Blackboard and Internet Explorer recently. We think there is an interaction with our load balancer (which is an F5 BigIP – forget which version). We have found that Internet Explorer 6.0 will randomly slow to a crawl, where Firefox is zipping along just fine.
This appears to be a new phenomenom (February 2006), although we cannot point to an exact date, but it manifests itself as random slowdowns in IE only and it appears to be only with our Blackboard system sitting behind our F5 load balancer, not with other systems. We think it is a threading problem in the browser, but can’t really explain it. Blackboard distinguishes itself from other applications on that load balancer by having horrible HTML loaded down with images, etc, but it’s still strange.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
FYI – we tracked this issue down to our BigIP, cookie injection, and we are upgrading them. An F5 engineer was able to reproduce the problem.
David,
What is your current (fixed) version of bigip that fixed your problem?
Thanks
kd
We are on 9.x now I believe. The core of the problem was cookie injection as a load balancing technique as I recall.
David
Hi David,
We have some staff (@ Leeds University, UK) who seem to have run into this problem, or something similar, and i was wondering if i could get some more detail from you about this?
thanks in advance,
Andy