IE7 Very Slow with PeopleTools 8.50

This is my experience with Internet Explorer and PeopleTools 8.50.

We found that IE7 on PeopleTools 8.50 was VERY SLOW. Pages would take between 3 to 8 seconds to render in the browser making the user experience unacceptable. IE 6, FireFox and Google Chrome performed very fast in comparison. You can watch an example of this here.

I observed that while the browser was rendering the page my PCs cpu went very high and MCSHIELD.EXE process seemed to be the culprit. MCSHIELD is McAfee Anti Virus process which scans (amongst other things) web pages for viruses.

So, we logged a P2 with My Oracle Support. We're not live on 8.50 yet but this was a show stopper to go live so this is still a P2. The Support analyst came back immediatley saying that this was a known problem with IE7, 8,50 and McAfee and that other users had reported similar problems and had disabled "Script Scanning" and this had worked around the problem. See ICE 1513373000.

Well, I completely uninstalled McAfee from my workstation and I still had the performance problem. It's possible that under some circumstances McAfee was causing a problem but this was not what I was seeing.

Turns out this problem is caused by an IE 7 addon. The IE Developer Toolbar . If I disable this then IE7 works fast.

The odd thing is that IE7 with the Developer Toolbar is absolutely fine with PeopleTools 8.49!!! Got this still logged with Oracle as a) they should be aware of the cause and b) need a heads up that there may be other addons that exhibit similar problems.



Comments

Hi Graham,

We are facing similar issue with PeopleTools 8.50.17 and IE (same behaviour with 7 and 8).

Do you have a fix now from peopleSoft ?
Thanks,
Stéphane.
Graham said…
Hi Stéphane

No fix from Oracle. You may notice that Oracle never uses IE when demonstrating PeopleSoft at conferences or events. We have found performance to be just fine on Chrome and FireFox. I've not tried IE9 yet.

Our "fix" as described above was to disable certain IE plugins.
Graham - Would you mind sharing the plugins that you had to disable. In our installation we did see differences in performance when we disabled the virus script scan on McAfee. However this is definitely not an acceptable solution from our security standards perspective. Wondering what the IE plugins were so we could try at our end.
Rich Nelson said…
We are having a very similar problem with IE7 and IE8 using PT 8.51.13 with HRMS 8.9. IE8 performs a little better, but not much.

The problem happens when the RTF Editor is enabled on a page.

When a user clicks on a field drop-down and changes the value, it takes ~4 seconds to finish processing the change so that the user can move to the next field, while with FireFox, it is less than 1 second.

We disabled AJAX and that "fixes" the problem, but that disables the partial page refresh functionality that 8.5x is pushing as a benefit.
Graham said…
@Paddy: The Microsoft developer toolbar was teh biggest culprit. You could whitelist your PeopleSoft web servers in your AV software if you can convince your security manager that content is always safe from PeopleSoft.

Switching to IE 9 is the solution (or Firefox for Chrome (in 8.52))