Our company provides web-based management software (servicedesk, helpdesk, timesheet, etc) for our clients.
One of them have been causing a great headache for some months complaining about the connection speed with our servers.
In our individual tests, the connection and response speeds are always great.
Some information about this specific client :
- They have about 300 PC’s on their local network, all using the same bandwith/server for internet access.
- They dont allow us to ping their server, so we cant establish a trace route.
- They claim every other site (google, blogs, news, etc) are always responding fast. We know for a fact they have no intention to mislead us and know this to be true.
- They might have up to 100 PC’s simulateneously logged in our software at any given time. They have a need to increase that amount up to 300 so this is a major issue.
- They are helpfull and colaborative in this issue we are trying to resolve for a long time.
Some information about our server and software :
- We have been able to allocate more then 400 users at a single time without major speed losses for other clients.
- We have gone extensive lengths to make good use of data caching and opcode caching in the software itself, and we did notice the improvement (from fast to faster)
- There are no database, CPU or memory bottlenecks or leaks. Other clients are able to access the server just fine.
We have little to no knowledge on how to do some analyzing on specific end-user problems (Apache running under Windows server), and this is where I could use a lot of help.
Anything that might be related to Apache configuration would also be helpfull.
While all signs points to it being an internal problem in this specific client network, we are dedicating this effort to solve that too, if that is the case, but do not have capable or instructed professionals to deal with network problems (they do, however, while their main argument is that ‘all other sites are fast, only yours is slow’)
you might want to have a look at the tools from google “page speed family”: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/overview.html
your customer should maybe run the page speed extension for you. maybe then you can find out what is the problem: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/extension.html