Zimbra

szkoplin · #1 (**permalink**) 03-26-2010, 08:39 AM

Hello,

My wife is a professor at Rider University and uses Rider's Zimbra webmail for work. About 3 weeks ago she began to suffer from severe time-lags on every page starting from the login. I called Rider IT support and they suggested cleaning her Firefox cache and using basic HTML and losing styles. None of the suggestions worked. Neither the 2 iMac's or her MBPro can connect wirelessly from home. Outside the house, her MBPro has no problem.

I then tried having her Macbook Pro connect directly with ethernet instead of the Time Machine/wireless we use every day without problem. Guess what - no problems! Her browsers (Safari and Firefox) have no problems with any other websites when connected wirelessly.

Any ideas what might be causing the problem?

Thanks in advance for the suggestions.

Steven

LMStone · #2 (**permalink**) 03-26-2010, 09:07 AM

Sounds like the home wireless could be the problem.

After the login, Zimbra does a lot of "lazy loading" of code in the background. If the wireless is slow, that's for sure when you'll notice it.

One good test is, right after login, hover over the mini-calendar. Days with appointments should turn dark and you should get a popup with the events of the day over which you are hovering. If that takes more than few seconds, or you get a timeout error, it's your connection (or you have a very slow computer).

You can also try loading a content-rich site like CNN.com and see how fast that loads wireless vs. wired. (Clear your cache in between of course).

One common problem we have seen is users think their laptop has associated with their home wireless, but for whatever reason has instead associated with another access point, which may or may not have a weaker signal, or (if it's totally open and unencrypted) is being flooded with other users' traffic.

Also, you may indeed have a top-notch home wireless setup, but if your teenage daughter is streaming iTunes videos of Lady Ga Ga in the next room wirelessly while doing MySpace with her friends, you will still have problems. Wireless is half-duplex, not full-duplex like wired, meaning only one station can broadcast at any one time. It could be worse; she could be streaming Katy Perry...

Hope that helps,
Mark

szkoplin · #3 (**permalink**) 03-26-2010, 09:30 AM

Mark,

Thanks for the quick response.

I have broadband cable access at home, and almost always have fast connections. This problem occurs all of the time, including when my son is at school. You think Lady Gaga is bad... And I do check the access point because my son used to try to change it when I've blocked him during homework time.

Other machines fly when my wife is slogging through Zimbra. The connection slows to molasses when she hits the link to login and continues until she has exited.

I'm perplexed.

Steven