30 second delay with certain clients

Anon

I have a product running PHP 4.0.6 that is used by highschools and we are running into a strange problem at two of those schools. If they request any PHP page on our site, they get about a 30 second delay before the pages loads, no matter how simple or complex the page is. If they request a plain html page, it loads just fine. I have tried a number of tests. I had them try to load php pages from Zend.com and they loaded fine. I reconfigured Apache to run html pages through the PHP parser and they experienced the 30 second delay when loading the simple html page. Oddly, they are having the same problem loading their own intranet pages, which are written in ASP. They are not using a proxy server and they have a small Cisco firewall.

Is there any PHP configuration setting that might be causing our server to request something from their client which causes the hang up because their client can't respond properly to the request? It seems like when they request a PHP page, the server is waiting for something and then times out when it doesn't get it.

Has anyone experienced something like this before? It may very well be a problem with their firewall or something but we're having trouble getting access to their technical person so we are not able to go sit on their network and run tests or network diagnostics at the moment. Thanks in advance for any help.

amcgrath

"...they are having the same problem loading their own intranet pages, which are written in ASP..." this suggests that the problem does not have anything to do with PHP, rather, as you suspect, hardware/firewall related. Since not all of the other school has this problem, this is where I would focus my attention.

Anon

Yes, that's what I was thinking at first, and it may very well be something on their end, but I had them try to access a PHP page from Zend's website and it came up fast and I had them access a JSP page from a large website and it came up just fine as well. It's probably something on their end, but it appears that there is something about the way PHP is set up on our system that causes whatever problem they have to pop up whereas it may or may not pop up when trying to access other sites. I guess I'm thinking that it's not necessarily a "problem" on our end as much as something "unique" on our end that is triggering the "problem" on their end.