One of our clients is getting ready to launch their SharePoint 2007 MOSS implementation into a large enterprise environment. While they’ve done some basic branding and customizations, they aren’t doing anything very unusual, but were dealing with some unusually long page load times. What they recently discovered was that the load balancing solution they are using – F5 – has a default setting to enable a feature called Nagle’s Algorithm. While this is supposed to increase the efficiency of the network communications, it apparently doesn’t play well with SharePoint ( I’m sure network folks out there can explain the details of why better than I ). Once the Nagle’s Algorithm feature is disabled, performance and page loading return to normal.
I haven’t seen this conflict specifically with the Microsoft NLB solution yet, but it is an available setting so should be something to consider there as well.