slow pages when xp sp2 firewall is enabled

Our customers running XP SP2 with firewall enabled using internet explorer
experience slowness (each page load takes about four times longer).

The pages are served from mainframe sitting behind a CISCO 11506 content
switch. Images have been offloaded to two Windows 2003 servers running IIS
6.0. All requests go to the content switch. The content switch handles the
requests to the server and establishes a flows back to the requesting
machines.

We concluded that the conflict was between the Windows 2003 IIS box and the
XP2 SP2 firewalled box, because:

Case 1: slow result when images flows from IIS and page flows from mainframe
and xp sp2 firewall enabled

Case 2: normal response when image flows from mainframe and page flows from
mainframe and xp sp2 firewall enabled

Case 3: normal response whe images flows from IIS and page flows from
mainframe and xp sp2 firewall disabled

Adding internet explorer to the program exception list did not help.


Cisco came to the same conclusion because the content switch is always
present, all flows pass through it and the only case were slowness occurs is
when the XP2 firewall is enabled on the client box and Windows 2003 IIS is
serving the images.

Our customers do not wish to disable the firewall if at all possible.

Any fixes at the server side?

Thanks,
Claude

Have your customers do a search(or you could) on stopping IE from checking
for scheduled tasks on remote computers as well as improving the max
connections. The reg tweaks for this will be in the InternetSettings key and
are DWord MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and set to a
Decimal value between 8 and 20. Let us know if this helps. TTFN.

Could not find the InternetSettings entry.

"The Unknown P" wrote:

Have your customers do a search(or you could) on stopping IE from checking
for scheduled tasks on remote computers as well as improving the max
connections. The reg tweaks for this will be in the InternetSettings key and
are DWord MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and set to a
Decimal value between 8 and 20. Let us know if this helps. TTFN.

Yes. It works. Thank you much.

"The Unknown P" wrote:

Have your customers do a search(or you could) on stopping IE from checking
for scheduled tasks on remote computers as well as improving the max
connections. The reg tweaks for this will be in the InternetSettings key and
are DWord MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and set to a
Decimal value between 8 and 20. Let us know if this helps. TTFN.

Sorry. It actually didn't work. I had cached content which made it look
like it was working.

"The Unknown P" wrote:

Have your customers do a search(or you could) on stopping IE from checking
for scheduled tasks on remote computers as well as improving the max
connections. The reg tweaks for this will be in the InternetSettings key and
are DWord MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and set to a
Decimal value between 8 and 20. Let us know if this helps. TTFN.