OWA outlook web access very very slow to load intermittent but happens often

[robintech]

Wondering if anybody has had a recent, or over the last couple of months issue with OWA being very slow to load. Has the blue envelope animation for about 30 seconds no matter the cache, browser or user, other times will go straight in in milliseconds, happens about 30% of the time.

 

With Fiddler it doesn't show any traffic going through related to anything OWA, the browser dev tools also show no activity in Chrome or Edge it just pauses dead while the blue envelope animation plays

 

We've not noticed anything on the firewall that we can find, nothing in logs on azure, Fiddler seems to improve it so thought maybe certificate based but difficult to test and not sure.

Does seem better on a test ADSL line so thought back to firewall.

 

Using Seamless SSO with Password Hash Synchronization, Azure Active Directory Premium P1 MFA with our external IP is excluded (in case someone else has the same setup) thought this might be related to our external IP somehow and not the firewall itself and MFA skipping?

 

Don't fully understand the whole App situation with Azure and Office/OWA but can't see any errors in there they all say Success.

 

If anyone has ideas on this would be glad to hear them.

[Chuckster]

This might sound silly, but what processor are in your machines?

[robintech]

Happens on faster more modern ones like i5-8400 and slower older Core2 Duo ones as well. All Intel though

Intel® Core™ i5-3317U CPU @ 1.70GHz

Intel® Core™ i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz

Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz

[robintech]

Not sure if figured it out but might be the QUIC protocol they are rolling out https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-deploying-http3-on-exchange-online-servers-to-reduce-latency-by-up-to-67/

From a quick test on the laptop disabling QUIC stops the problem occurring and it works as normal

going to try disabling it in Edge and Google Chrome through group policy , QUIC is blocked in our firewall but the logs don't show anything for the rule being activated which is odd now I think about it.

[chazzy2501]

just in case: Do you know you can hold the CTRL key down when right clicking on the outlook icon to bring up the connection tests.

 

edit: oops outlook website nm

Edited February 15, 2022 by chazzy2501

[robintech]

Just to confirm this was QUIC or MSQUIC HTTP/3 as the rollout to Microsoft OWA servers increased it got gradually worse and worse for us as people hit those servers more often as now 70% have been updated.

Using GPO for Chrome and Edge to block QUIC it loads normally , nothing else seems to be broken by doing this (i hope)

 

Not sure how it is working out for others who have QUIC blocked in their firewalls must be something we have configured that causes it to attempt the connection with QUIC and wait for a timeout maybe in javascript it preloads or try's again and eventually hits a OWA server that isn't upgraded.

 

[jffabc]

Hello: I'm experiencingthe problem with that blue envelope animation continuing for very long time... sometimes just blocked without any response., when I log into my university's webmail OWA site. I'm using Chrome under Linux.

How can I block the QUIC connection on my notebook?

[robintech]

Hello: I'm experiencingthe problem with that blue envelope animation continuing for very long time... sometimes just blocked without any response., when I log into my university's webmail OWA site. I'm using Chrome under Linux.

How can I block the QUIC connection on my notebook?

 

if you can get to chrome://flags in the address bar then search for Quic or "Experimental Quic Protocol" and set to disabled

[pacapps]

This also appears to solve a OneNote (web) sync / update issue I have been having.

[KK20]

I am so glad we arent the only ones with core2duos still on the network. we even have 20 of these remaining "Pentium® Dual-Core CPU E5200 @ 2.50GHz" till summer. In my defence with an SSD and 4Gb RAM they arent much slower than the i3 6 series for Outlook and Word use.

 

We GPO'd QUIC from Day 1, originally I didnt like the sound of what it did and it seemed a good hunch as time went on.

Edited May 20, 2022 by KK20