A customer called in the other day and told me that his web application took a long time to start. My initial thought was (off course) that it was a matter of the classic slow-to start web services I’ve written about earlier.
(What to do about the slow startup of web services)
As I learned more about his problem I found that this was more than just a simple matter of pre-compilation and keeping your w3wp.exe alive.
The customer was using authenticode signed assemblies in his web application. When that application calls the assembly for the first time it will want to go on-line and check that the certificate is still valid. So, what if this is an internal server with no Internet access? Well, then we have a problem. The process will spend quite some time trying to check the certificate revocation lists. Eventually it will give up, but for my customer this meant that it hung for at least 20 seconds upon startup.
To resolve this I’d chose one of the following three options:
This is will obviously resolve the problem, but may not always be possible.
If you own the assemblies then you might want to consider not using Authenticode signing at all. A Strong Named Assembly might be sufficient. For more information on Strong Named Assemblies and how to create them, please see the following article on MSDN: How to: Sign an Assembly with a Strong Name
If all else fails you can disable Signature Verification by adding the following to your machine.config or application.exe.config:
Okay, so if we suspect that this is the problem, how can we verify this?
I got a memory dump from my customer, so I’ll use that to demonstrate.
First of all you want to make sure the dump is taken as the application pool hangs upon the first request. Getting a dump right after the problem has occurred will usually do us no good at all. We need to get the dump as the problem is actually ocurring. Having made sure the dump is fine I open up the dump in windbg and load sos.dll. I then use the !aspxpages command to see the pending requests currently on the server. !aspxpages dumps all the HttpContexts found on the heap so we get a list of all currently executing requests, as well as recently finished ones that haven’t been garbage collected yet.
So, the request on thread 19 is the one we want. As we can see in the ThreadId column it is the only active request. Let’s jump to that thread and investigate what it is doing.
So we’re in the Page_Load event of the page in question, but apart from that !clrstack doesn’t tell us much. Let’s take a look at the native callstack instead using the kb-command.
Here we see that we’re currently trying to check the certificate revocation list. This is done on a separate thread so this thread is currently doing nothing but waiting. Our next step would be to find this thread, but first we can find out the name of the .dll that we’re trying to verify. Look at the first argument to GetPublisher.
So it’s a Microsoft .dll that is part of the Enterprise Library. Good to know. Now let’s find the thread that is attempting to retrieve the revocation list by running ~*kb and scanning through the threads until we find this one:
This is the thread. To finally verify that it is in fact attempting to download the Certificate Revocation List we can check the value of the first argument to cryptnet!CInetSynchronousRetriever, InetRetrieveEncodedObject and CObjectRetrievalManager::RetrieveObjectByUrl or the second argument to cryptnet!InetSendReceiveUrlRequest as I did above.
In this case the customer chose to disable Signature Verification completely rather than granting Internet access to the server.
If you found the windbg-portion of this post hard to understand I can recommend a closer look at my Debugging School (In the menu to the left). Begin with Getting started with windbg - Part I and you should be set to go in no time.
/ Johan