weird network slowdown- specific to one client's network when accessing my site. Ple

[iansilv]

I have a SAAS website that provides office management software for a company. The site, through their network, runs painfully slow. Whenever they report problems, I cna jump on the site and have ti work for me just fine. As in, it loads as fast as any other site. But on their network, it is just plain slow- timeout slow. Other sites load fine for the most part. They are running a bunch of imacs, but i have a macbook pro. They have a mac server,a nd they have a firewall. Also- they ahve dedicated a large portion of bandwidth on their network to my site.

This should not matter though, as the site is just snappy outside of their network, even on a regular network- and they have a T-1.

Is there anything that could be configured on their network that oculd possibly slow my site down specifically- if my site is SAAS site that is makign a lot of MS SQL database calls, and running some ajax, all in asp.net 3.5- page reloads, page refreshes all done with checking a database each time... I don't know, I am just trying to describe the problem as best as I can...

Any help would be appreciated- their network guy is looking in to it, but he can't figure anything out yet.

 

[ameoba]

A T1 isn't really all that much bandwidth these days - only about 1.5Mbps (my DSL is rated at like 6). The situation gets worse quickly if a portion of the T1 is used for voice (each voice channel is 1/24 of the line). It wouldn't take more than 1-2 people using VOIP or streaming internet radio to seriously impact performance.

You mention AJAX - if you're using some Javascript libraries, make sure that you're not requesting 14 different JS files. Remote clients, even those with plenty of bandwidth, often have significantly higher latency so requesting a large number of individual files (same goes for images, css & whatnot) can seriously impact performance. The YSlow plugin for Firefox or the Safari network timeline can be very helpful at identifying these things.

Are you looking at their data when checking out the site, or a much smaller set of data that you use for testing? Your test data might be small enough that inefficiencies in the code/missing indexes aren't obvious. You might also want to be on the lookout for any potential locking issues - you won't catch them yourself, but it might be disastrous with multiple users.

To accurately check the performance of your app, obviously, you need to be at a remote location, on an external network. This is your excuse to go sit at a coffee shop on the clock