BLOG - A TECHNICAL RESOURCE

I use Linux hosting with Apache web server.  I recently installed some SSL’s for a client project and I noticed that the site was loading miserably slow on Internet Explorer 7, 8, and even version 9 (as advertised their best ever… yea right!).  The site loaded great with all other browsers.  I wasn’t really surprised, because Internet Explorer is always a thorn in my side, but I was a little concerned because I hadn’t worked with this type of problem yet.  I went to Google to see what I could find.

I found this blog post which gave me a working solution:  http://blog.vpire.com/822/apache-ssl-slow-on-internet-explorer/

“…I finally found the source of the problem in the ssl.conf file.
Search for the statement below:

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" \
            nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
            downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

and replace with the statement below:

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [1-5].*" \
            nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \
            downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [6-9].*" \
             ssl-unclean-shutdown

After finished making the changes, just restart your apache and then I retest my web apps again and it does load faster. I try to compare the packet transfer between client and server and it does reduce about a quarter of the traffic between client and server. Case closed and save some money from purchasing the SSL accelerator.”

I contacted my web host about this issue, they were able to make the global adjustment on my web server.  Problem solved.