SSL problems - ISP-related?

SSL takes forever to load

[petersjm]

I designed a site (far from professional, but it works) for someone who wants to have merch on sale online. It uses shared SSL. It worked perfectly for 4 months (may-aug), and then all of a sudden it took forever to load, and when it did load parameters wouldn't be passed from php page to php page. At first I thought it was the host's fault (yahoo). I had a bunch of people test it, and most of them didn't have problems. So I thought I had a freak computer. Well, then the guy I did the site for was having problems, and I thought about who tested it...people on dialup accounts, people on DSL, people on corporate LANs. The people who had problems with it? ALL on the same cable ISP. Of course the ISP denied it, and said it was a design problem, and that I should contact their business services to have them design the site. Yeah nice try. That pissed me off, but I was already too tired to deal with them. So I dialed-up access on one comp, cabled on the other, and loaded the page at the same time. Freakishly enough, the dialup account loaded and let me complete the process twice in the time that the cable account couldn't even load the initial page once. And, SSL functions of osCommerce also take forever to complete, so i KNOW it's not my design.

If anyone has extra time out there, sticky mail me for the URL and click on the "Stuff" link, and let me know if it loads fine or if it sits there forever. And, as a side, most of the time if it takes forever to load, I can stop loading, go back or forward, then come back to the page I'm trying to load, and it's all there. I'm gonna try to preload the images to see if that's a problem, but I don't know if that'll do anything...

Thanks.
jeff

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 10:40 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2003]
[edit reason] Specifics removed [/edit]

[DaveAtIFG]

petersjm and I exchanged some good sticky about this yesterday. So where does it stand now Jeff? Let us know if you need further testing!

Let's see... At $100 per hour, that's... Where's my calculator?!? ;)

[petersjm]

lol, i hope you don't find your calculator...;)

well, preloading images didn't do anything. i've had 2 other friends look at it, one on dialup and one on i don't remember what, and no problem whatsoever. me? same old. it's such the freakiest thing. fortunately this isn't the main source of income for the businesses. i've decided to give it a rest for today and hope the answer miraculously comes to me. :)

i'll let y'all know if i find out anything conclusive. but after further review, the play stands as called.

[DaveAtIFG]

You know, a missing/unclosed table tag used to cause old versions of Netscape to exhibit similar loading quirks... Not consistent with being unique to an ISP or cable connection of course... But it couldn't hurt to run a page or two through a validator if you haven't done it lately. And try different browsers from the same connection.

[petersjm]

I'm gonna do the validator soon. But I swear I'm about to strangle this thing. :) For a while, for testing, I put the same exact catalog page on the regular server and on the secure server (or, shall I say, in the secure folder, whichever you prefer). Nonsecure page loaded in a snap, secure took forever. I've also noticed that when I ftp files to the secure area, the transfer rate is often < 1kb/s on a cable connection. There's something wrong with that, isn't there? :-Þ Ahh, who to blame, who to blame...;)

Here at home I've tested it on Win98 using IE6 and on WinXP Pro on IE6 and Firebird 0.6.1. Same results. To quote Adam Sandler's Baffoon, "It blows my forkin mind!" :-D

[DaveAtIFG]

I know little about secure connections and certificates. As I understand it, a secure connection is transferring encrypted data. IF (note the big if! ;) ) that's correct, there will be some overhead at each end to encrypt/decrypt, so the secure connection should be slower. How much slower, I can't say, but certainly not more then 20% I would GUESS. Establishing the connection could be much slower due to allocating the resources required to do the crypting.

Hmmm... Any ideas on this guys? Anyone have any actual experience in this area? I'm just speculating here... In other words, HEEELLPP! :)

[petersjm]

*pulling hair, gnashing teeth*

Ok, I've run my pages through validators and found some little errors. However, I think the biggest one I found, was it telling me that LINK is not allowed on the SSL pages. (I was using that to link to my stylesheets.) Well, I took that off, and my new store front page loaded fine. The new store front? Simply text and links. No products, no images, no background even. Page loaded RIGHT up. However, product pages still take forever, unless I click the link a few times in a row. Two usually does the trick. :P

Then, looking at the store front, I say, hmm. That looks boring. I should add our logo. So I did. ONE logo, 26k in size, sitting in the secure folder, and BAM, the page does its take-forever trick again. Take the logo off, page loads right up.

Am I cursed?

*EDIT: Perhaps not, I spoke too soon. It's not doing it again even w/o the picture. Sigh.

[DaveAtIFG]

If you're familiar, traceroute and ping may help you narrow it down. Trace and ping by domain name, then by IP to insure that it's not a name server issue. Is this Greek to you or possibly helpful?

[petersjm]

Ping gives me an average time of around 98-110ms. Tracert gives me 12 hops, 1 of which is my router, then one I dont know, then 6 of my isp, then 1 data/internet exchange center, then 3 of my site host. Does that say anything? I know how to run it, I'm just not sure what it means. :)

Like I said, I'm pretty sure this isn't my fault, since (I think) I'm doing everything I need to do, and since even osc causes trouble. I only get this frustrated when it seems like it's out of my hands and I can't find the problem. :o

[DaveAtIFG]

I'm thinking running a traceroute repeatedly on both a "quick" connection that works and a "slow" one that doesn't, may be revealing.

If the results in the last few hops, at the server end, differ significantly and consistently between the connections, you may have some indication of where the problem lies.