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Sophos Central slowing down Chrome

mmacwan

Has anyone experienced Sophos Central causing Chrome to be extremely slow? Eventually the page will load but the only way around this is to keep the webpage open and then open up another tab to get it to be quicker. Have reinstalled Chrome and this has had no affect

We aren't using the Web Control either and this has been turned off



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  • 0 in reply to Nick Cuddemi

    Thanks for coming back Nick

    The user who is experiencing this issue has Visual Studio installed and the developers here are having issues with that and Sophos, don't know if they are related somehow

  • 0 in reply to mmacwan

    Interesting.

     

    Have you removed Sophos to see if the problem goes away?

    I know the uninstall process can take 10 minutes and require a couple reboots but that's what i've been doing to troubleshoot some issues on my end.

  • 0 in reply to Nick Cuddemi

    Hi I haven't done that, the computer that is having problems runs other processes that take hours to start up so rebooting it needs to be scheduled out of hours

    What issues have you had on your end?

  • 0

    I have this problem currently on a Terminal Server. Same behavior, on initial startup pages won't load. Once the first page loads new tabs will load instantly. 

    Other browsers on the server don't have this problem. Not all users affected. Have tried "resting browser" option in chrome and clearing the cache. 

     

    We also don't use the Web Control. 

  • 0 in reply to Saul Rojas

    Hi Saul

    Did doing this fix the problem?

    Also do you have Hardware Acceleration turned on? I've seen this can slow down Chrome on a Terminal Server in the past

  • 0 in reply to mmacwan

    No the things I tried did not solve the problem. Last night I rebooted the server and uninstalled Chrome and then after another reboot reinstalled it. 

    Waiting to hear back from my users to see if that fixed it. 

     

    I did disable Hardware Acceleration on one user but now that you mention it, I don't know if that option needs to be checked for every user. I assume you must since it seems Chrome settings save under the User's appdata folder.

    Will check and report back.

  • 0

    Bump! I have this issue too. I've tried updating chrome, reinstalling chrome with restarts, it hangs for so long it prompts users to close the tab. Its also not just loading web pages but the chrome menu as well.

  • 0 in reply to Andrew Mueller

    There are a number of components of Sophos that could be related to what you're seeing.  The obvious ones that come to mind are:

    • HMPA
    • Web Protection/Control
    • Detours

    I would start by renaming the hmpalert.dll files (\windows\system32\ and \windows\syswow64\) and re-launch the browser process.  This will ensure that the browser processes do not get the hmpaalert.dll injected into them.  Does this help?

    The next test is the web protection / control component.  In order to inspect web traffic, traffic is redirected (on Windows 8.1+) via the swi_fc.exe process.  So you essentially have:
    Browser -> swi_fc.exe -> internet/web proxy.

    If you disable the 3 features that rely on this redirection/proxying of traffic, then the browser will not connect to swi_fc.exe. The 3 features are:

    1. Web Control (web control policy)
    2. Scan downloads in progress  (threat protection policy)
    3. Block access to malicious websites (threat protection policy)

    As a test: If you use a tool such as Process Explorer you can see under the TCP/IP tab the connections being made by the browser process either direct to the internet or upstream proxy or to swi_fc.exe over 127.0.0.1.

    To disable detours, which is loaded into processes as they start, you can set LoadAppInit_DLLs to 0 under:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\wow6432node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\

    This prevents all of the DLLs listed in the AppInit_DLLs registry value to be loaded as a test.

    Identifying the component causing the issue is the first step.

    Regards,
    Jak

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