Irony
My story begins with slowness, like many IT stories before it. Let me give some context. This is regarding a custom application hosted at an MSP. The problem started about a week after production launch. Staff and the broader customer base began experiencing slowness and timeouts. The usual answer ensues. "The servers look good" says MSP. "CPU doesn't go above 5%, tons of free memory, disk time is less than 1%, network utilization is low. It isn't anything on our side." Now with the onus successfully shifted, the problem lands internally. Pinging the application host at the MSP (MPLS circuit) produces a 1ms response time, impressive latency for sure. Next up, I was able to capture a "slow" event in wireshark: The first line is a query from my client to the server. The next two packets are from the server to my client. Strange result for a machine "doing nothing" as the MSP said. It took over half a second to start returning t...