The SiteMinder WebAgent is very slow (greater than 30sec) at processing requests.

Products

• CA Single Sign On Secure Proxy Server (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign On SOA Security Manager (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign-On

Issue/Introduction

Description:

Customer is experiencing Delays in requests being served by web server/WebAgent, when he enables the SiteMinder WebAgent.

When he disables the WebAgent (EnableWebAgent =No in WebAgent.conf) then there are no delays and pages are served immediately by Web Server. So, Customer wants to know the reason for these delay in serving requests when SiteMinder WebAgent is enabled on web server.

Solution:

For the SiteMinder WebAgent it is important that all of the virtual host names that a web-server is serving requests for resolve via DNS to an IP address. If they do not resolve via DNS the request is held up until the DNS request times out (usually a period of 30sec - 1min) before the request resumes being processed.

SiteMinder WebAgent does a resolve host on the HTTP_HOST name included in the web agent requests. That means that for all virtual host names that your server is processing requests for; have to resolve to an IP address, via an entry in the hosts files or via DNS.

What can happen, if the names does not resolve is that the WebAgent will wait for the DNS timeout before proceeding, which will cause a delay of up to 1min per request.

The DNS lookup is performed by the WebAgent in case there are WebAgent mapping rules, mapping different IP addresses to different WebAgent names, the lookup is performed as part of the request initialization, and is done even if there is only a DefaultAgentName and no AgentName mappings.

To resolve the delay, the virtual host name needs to be resolvable by adding an entry in your DNS server, or by adding a local entry in the /etc/hosts file.

For Unix systems the /etc/hosts file is in /etc/hosts, or for Windows the file is in <Windows>/system32/drivers/etc/Hosts. It depends on your installation, but usually an entry of :

127.0.0.1 virtualhost.sample.com

mapping the name to the localhost IP address can be used.

Environment

Release:
Component: SMIIS