Netscaler Knowledgebase

Hi guys,

Once again I am in need of some of your expert assistance 

we have a shrepoint 2007 farm which is accessed via our netscalers (running 9.2 build). I setup sharepoint using Citrix's own App template and the farm has been running well for the past 3 months.

However about a week ago users started reported some issues. randomly when trying to open a document it can take upto 35 minutes for the file to open. This can be a simple word document of about 15Mb in size. Also when refreshing lists the views don't always refresh properly and requires a manual refresh in the browser.

If you set the PCs host file to point direct at one of the sharepoint servers, the problems are resolved, so it does appear to be related to the Netscalers. 

During testing, I ran MS Filemon utility and found that when the issue occured the machine was dowloading the document to a temporary IE file very slowly. Monitoring on the Netscaler showed little requests and responses on the actual VServer.

Has anyone had similar experiences or any tips on how to monitor client-ns-sharepoint connections?

your help is appreciated

Jason

Thanks for the reply, firstly we are not using SSL offloading (as yet). Secondly, sgnificant testing has been carried out since my original post via various users and our team. The slow file opening is only part of the issue. if you open a sharepoint page in IE with say a list in it and refresh the page, it will sometimes not retrieve the list and a coupe of refreshes are required before it loads.

We have built a complete new sharepoint farm in virtual with 2 backend SP servers, and re-loaded the config on a test Netscaler with the same OS (9.2 Build 45.7cl) and can replicate the issue in the test environment. We tested both a single server against a VIP as you suggested, but alas the issue remained.

From digging around the web, we think it may be related to cookie persistence on the LB VS, as it appears IE has issue with it, we are due to swap to SOURCEIP for the level, but we have literally only dug this info up yesterday and haven't tested it yet.

Maybe someone could confirm that LB VS for AppExpert templates only show their persistence levels on the command line, as the 'method and persistence' tab is missing when you open the backend servers config?

cheers, Jason