Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 18:55:42 -0500 From: Charlie Summers <charlie@xxxxxxxxxx>
Folks; Got an odd problem, seemingly related to the one Mr. Lasman saw last fall, although not identical since he was receiving hard errors and I'm not. I was screwing around today and created a self-signed certificate for SSL (I am not going to be using it for ecommerce, but rather to protect some specific transactions I want to make with the machine), and as a side effect the admin routines (which I use only when absolutely required, thanks) are now served by the secure server. (Kinda ugly, that - would make more sense if the script actually asked permission to pull a stupid stunt like that, but let it go for now.) And it is _glacially_ slow. I don't mean it's a little lagged, I mean it took almost five minutes to load the "main" admin webpage, and I only have . It works fine, and other pages are somewhat speedier, but loading the main page takes forever to load. I'm using Netscape 4.5/Mac, but the slowdown doesn't _seem_ to be on the client side; I keep getting a lot of, "Host ...:81 contacted. Waiting for reply..." notes that seem to hang there forever. Once it finally _does_ load, it works just peachie; I haven't received any errors from the thing, and can do what needs to be done. Tests pulling regular site pages through https doesn't anecdotally show any difference in time between http and https...the problem seems _specifically_ limited to the administration perl script.
Actually, there are a few issues here and I've noted them in the past several times. The userlist.cgi and the sitelist.cgi don't work properly on a Raq4 with Netscape, particularly non-American versions of Netscape. The other pages are mostly OK. Thawte, the issuer of my certificate, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure this out, because we thought it was some weird certificate problem at first.
I had no problems with my Raq2, and I never had a Raq3 to try it on. I've filed a complain with Cobalt about this at least once and it's never been fixed. I've given up using Netscape and I use something else to admin the server. I do have a slightly non-standard, Cobalt Professional Services-issued Apache.
One thing you can try, which worked for me BEFORE my CPS upgrade, was suggested by ennio@xxxxxxxxx on Thu, 26 Oct 2000 06:43:51 GMT on the Cobalt Developers List: (have a look for my reply using the keywords English, Netscape, and Michelle in the archives for the developers list)
I had the same kind of behaviour and my problem was that my browser was set up to the German language after switching to US English the browser woks perfectly. I hope it help also for you too.
What he's saying here is that you need to go into Netscape and, in the languages preferences, make sure your first listed preference is English (US).
The second issue has to do with Netscape (at least on the Mac) and https in general. Netscape's cryptography libraries are *REALLY* slow. We've just finished designing a whole site that relies on SSL, and even serving out just regular pages, Netscape IS VERY slow on the Macintosh, and it's just a Netscape thing. Internet Explorer, Opera, etc, are all suitably nimble.
Michelle