Thursday, May 10, 2012

NETBIOS over TCP and certain Building Block load times

We were investigating why certain 3rd party Building Blocks took a long time to load screens (10+ seconds). This occurred with EvaluationKit and Internships.com B2s.  This was consistent in our development and production environments.

When we analyzed the packet traffic, we saw that Windows Server was making several (pointless) NBSTAT name queries for certain Hosts related to those Building Blocks.

Wireshark - when doing GET /webapps/bbgs-internships_integration-bb_bb60/app/ssoUserTool


We tested
1 - adding Windows etc hosts entries for the Hosts
2 - disabling the default NETBIOS over TCP

Both had the same positive results: much faster load times for those particular Building Blocks.

Has anyone else encountered this issue with Building Blocks and Bb (Windows Server)?

Update:


  • We did get confirmation of other Bb Schools encountering the same performance issue with the Building Blocks
  • We have tested disabling the NETBIOS over TCP on our development/test systems, and are moving forward with deploying the change to  in production with this change.