So here’s a weird one. I get a call to say that the users web browsing is ultra slow and could I have a look. Being the distrusting soul that I am, I don’t take the problem description at face value – hey, 25yrs in IT has taught me one thing and that is to keep asking questions because eventually the truth will out. I guess this is the same game the police play.
Anyway, I digress. When I get to the machine my first thoughts are just how slow is slow? So I fire up the browser of choice – firefox 3.0.6 – and wait for the homepage to load. Hmm, google shouldn’t take that long. Briefly consider the time of day and then dismiss that as an issue – it’s pre-midday so America is still asleep and the UK isn’t home from work yet so frantic email checking, etc won’t be the issue. next I throw in a simple search and hit return and do a rough count of how long it takes to respond … hmm 15secs, that isn’t good. However, immediate thoughts are still not thinking rogue virus or malware at play because it’s literally 15secs until the page load bar starts to respond and once it does, the page then loads within a second or so.
My immediate thought at this juncture is that we have a DNS issue or this machine is suss in some way. Just to be sure, I get another user to do a few trial surfs and all working fine – so it isn’t the shared DNS service. Hmm again. I’m beginning to think I may just need to do a malware / virus / hijackthis scan. However, my next suspect is the startup parts of windows and my favourite tool for managing this is Starter by Codestuff in their own words they describe it as “yet another startup manager for MS Windows – sort of says it all. Anyway, there’s nothing odd in there and only one thing that perhaps I wouldn’t allow – googleupdater – so I untick it and reboot. No difference.
Next thought is to see if this is a system thing or firefox specific. Even though I’ve tried to educate my users to use firefox the system still has IE on it for those times when nothing else will work. Anyway, IE is responding as expected and all sites are fast, responsive and loading as expected. Hmmm, so it isn’t a virus, etc but all the same I’m going to my usual routine run of various tools. First up is HiJack This. Again, nothing unusual and so I move on to my malware scan. For this I tend to rotate through various ones but presently my favourite is Malwarebytes – after updating the signature files a quick scan reveals nothing so I fire off the full scan. An hour or so later and all is still clean. Next up is for me to check the AV logs – again nothing so I fire off a full system scan and again it reports back as clean.
Hmmm. Very, very weird. Suddenly I have a flash of inspiration and disable all the firefox addons and now the browser is fairly flying along, ah ha, I’ve found the issue. Now it’s just a matter of ploughing through the half dozen or so plugins and finding out which one is the culprit. Of the ones there, I’d mentally flagged the likely suspect as being the MS .Net Framework Assistant Plugin, so I left re-enabling that until last. After re-enabling each plugin in turn and then re-testing I find that all is working well so now I’m really scratching my head. I decide to give up for now and let the user get back to doing whatever. I advise them all appears OK and I now can’t re-create the initial problem.
I’m standing talking to another of the users when I get a plaintive cry of “its started again” so I wander back and look at the open tabs. Nothing untoward really but on a hunch I close the gmail tab, clear the cache (just to be sure) and start browsing with no discernable issues. I then ask the user to log back into their gmail account and within seconds of having logged back in, the browsing was back to taking 15secs to start!
At this point I gave up investigating the why (sometimes you have to admit being beaten), downloaded Google Chrome and told the user to use Chrome for their gmail and Firefox for everything else – so far, fingers crossed, etc we are two days into this experiment and all is going well.
