Apr 27, 2021

7:50pm Today we have had some slow response issues on the EQ SOBS server. We’ve been looking into this and isolating the problem.

The server itself is performing well and not causing any problems. Initially we thought it was a network issue, but once a connection is in place the network operation is fine.

We were able to confirm that the server processing of the request is performing fine, and that the response is sent just prior to it appearing on the customer’s browser. The delay appears to be between the time the browser sends a request, and the server begins processing the request.

Currently we believe this is related to the SSL certificate, not something we can simply remove. We have lodged a problem report with the SSL certificate provider.

In the meantime we have scheduled a reboot of the server this evening.

April 28, 2021 10am After the reboot last night the server was responding quickly, but this morning it has once again slowed down.

One of our technical support team identified a setting on the web server that may be restricting the number of active processes (Apache2: mpm pre-fork parameter MaxRequestWorkers). We looked at this more closely and confirmed that the server had indeed reached the MaxRequestWorkers value. We increased the value from 150 to 250. The server suddenly bounced back to life and the delays have disappeared.

We have now given this value further consideration and increased it to 300 which would seem to be a reasonable value for the current workload and the current server configuration. The load this morning was averaging around 175 processes, so we have plenty of scope now to handle additional requests.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused by those slow responses and hope that we have now seen the last of them.