We had another interesting support case recently where administrator users were getting slow login performance after installing a Winthrop Development Consultants product. When a standard user logged in they did not experience any delays.
The additional delay was around 90 to 120 seconds, after which everything would appear to work as normal.
After using GP Power Tools to capture logs during startup and login to Microsoft Dynamics GP, we were able to identify the cause.
When logging in as an administrator user (a user with elevated permissions at the SQL Level) such as ‘sa’ or ‘DYNSA’, Winthrop products will conduct a check for updates. The frequency that the check is performed at is controlled by the setting on the Update Check window and is set when a product is first installed. If the setting has not be selected or it is set for On Next Login, it will check each time an Administrator logs in. It is recommended to have the setting as In 1 week’s time or In 1 month’s time.
It is possible to change the setting to No automatic check, but that will mean you are never notified when new builds with fixes and new functionality have been released and so it is not recommended.
On a system which is not internet connection, the check fails immediately and so does not cause any delays. In this situation it does make sense to use the No automatic check setting.
However, for the site at which we were seeing delays, they were internet connected but we found out that their firewall was blocking sites outside of North America.
Winthrop Development Consultants are based in Perth, Australia and our website is hosted in Australia. This meant that access to the WinthropDC.com domain was blocked, but it took one to two minutes to timeout. We could see this just by trying to get to our website using a browser.
- https://www.winthropdc.com/home.htm FAILED
- http://winthropdc.com/GPPT FAILED
- https://winthropdc.wordpress.com/gp-power-tools-portal/ WORKED
Product pages (including product downloads) and update checks use the WinthropDC.com domain and they were failing. Our registration system (https://quicklicensemanager.com/) and blog pages (https://winthropdc.wordpress.com/) are hosted in North America so they were not affected.
Note: We have also seen customer sites blocking http:// URLs and only allowing https:// URLs. So even though all Winthrop sites will automatically redirect from http:// to https://, we have updated our latest builds (with last modified dates in 2022 or later) to only use https://.
The customer solved the issue by adding WinthropDC.com to a white or allowed list and the performance problems stopped.
Hope this information is useful.
David
This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.
Winthrop Development Consultants Blog 