Portal sometimes opening extremely slowly - related to IIS or WA?

[MatthewWoodmansee]

Good morning.  We have gotten Portal (10.9) up and running a few weeks ago, created several web apps, and opened it up to the company of 40 users.  We are using Windows Authentication and a local server environment.

My problem: On a somewhat-regular basis, when I open Portal, it takes a LONG time to load (just shows a white screen).  It takes so long that I reloaded it and cleared the cache the first few times it happened.

When inspecting the browser and checking the network activity, it appeared that one step was the reason for the length of the load.  It was validating the access of the user (I believe).  The URL is below (with our actual internal info replaced by "x"). Please also note that the web adaptor is hooked to the /portal/ portion of the URL since we already have Server on the machine.
https://www.**unspecified**.com/portal/sharing/rest/oauth2/validateAppAccess?f=json&client_id=arcgis...

I was told this might have something to do with IIS, but could not find a similar topic anywhere on the forums.  Anyone run into this problem before?  I have a brief history of that server and our enterprise creation history below if it helps.

Our Enterprise history:
20 months ago, we setup the new server, and I installed ArcGIS Server 10.7 only (no portal) with the web adaptor.  It has Windows Authentication and has worked fine.
This summer, we upgraded to 10.9.  I first upgraded Server to 10.9.
We installed Portal 10.9.  Installing the web adaptor caused some problems.  I will admit I gave the adaptor the server name in the URL instead of the final certificate name when first doing that setup.  We uninstalled the web adaptor with ESRI tech support and eventually got it working.
Apparently we have multiple DNS entries, so had to update some of the properties files in the Portal install area to get it to work.
Other than the periodic extremely slow load of the home page, the Portal appears to be working fine.

[BillFox]

Do the servers have enough hardware resources?

[MatthewWoodmansee]

Sadly not many people are using it yet, and there has been no major impact on the hardware that we have seen.  After posting this, I have had 2 people tell me that they do not have this problem.  I am in the process of determining if this issue is only with me.

[ChristopherPawlyszyn]

Did you configure a WebContextURL in Portal Admin -> System -> Properties?

If not, you may want to confirm your web adaptor is registered using the proper public-facing URL in Portal Admin -> System -> Web Adaptors -> <WA_ID>. If the URL is listed as the FQDN of the machine, you can either update the WA registration to the correct URL by appending /edit to the URL or you can set the WebContextURL.

[MatthewWoodmansee]

Good suggestion - this was something that took a while to get right when we performed the original installation. The web adaptor name in portaladmin is the machine name.  The URL for the web adaptor is the URL we want it to use, so I think we are ok in this part of the configuration.

[CraigRussell]

Hi Matthew

I've seen similar behaviour to this on my local ArcGIS Enterprise deployment in earlier versions.  I never quite nailed exactly what was happening, but I always suspected it was one of the following:

1. Accessing portal before server/data store had started; or
2. Changes to hostname after machine restart and/or enabling/disabling VPN

If the machine that you're referring to isn't on some sort of availability schedule (i.e. Enterprise is always running) then you can probably rule out #1.  On a server, #2 might be a problem if you have multiple DNS entries or network interface cards; there's some documentation for configuring Enterprise components for this scenario:

Installing Portal for ArcGIS—Portal for ArcGIS | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

Configure ArcGIS Server in advanced scenarios—ArcGIS Server | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

Create a data store—ArcGIS Enterprise | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

 Does the server have multiple DNS entries and/or NICs?

[MatthewWoodmansee]

Thank you for the response.  Enterprise is always running, so #1 should not be an issue. I do think that the database server (separate box) does spin down during off-hours, so the first data load needs to allow for the DB to spin up.

The server with ArcGIS Portal (and ArcGIS Server) does have multiple DNS entries.  We did tackle this during the Portal install, but it was never an issue when we originally setup ArcGIS Server.  I will read the documentation to see if Server needs to be re-configured, but those services have been working well for 20 months (Portal installed 2 months ago).  Plus the extremely slow load is in the home page and not the actual web maps/apps.

Regarding the data store - we actually don't have one setup.  The next step of our implementation is to setup the data store and Federate ArcGIS Server to bring everything together.  I was about to start on this when I ran into this slow loading issue.  Figured I would tackle this before taking the next step, in case I needed to backtrack on anything.

I will talk to our IT guy about your suggestions and see if any of your links or statements rings a bell with him.

Thanks - Matt