This problem has had me stumped for three days now, and I'm really running short on ideas. Really hope somebody else out there has some expertise on the mysterious ways of the SSL.
I'm running a Rails 2.0.2 Mongrel cluster behind an Apache proxy, and *sometimes* for some reasons that I can not understand, my SSL pages are getting atrociously slow... like 1-3 minutes to load.
I have verified that it is not any external addresses or pages that I include in my SSL pages, nor are there any problems with the non-SSL pages. Also, the DNS lookup for the SSL pages is as zippy as it ought to be.
I've been running my cluster with this configuration for several months now, and the problem has only started happening in the last week or so. There is nothing out of the ordinary with our traffic pattern this week... though I have anecdotally observed that the problem seems to happen most often during times of high traffic.
If you'd like to see it in action, the site is http://www.bonanzle.com and if you click either the "Register" or "Login" link (upper right corner) during high traffic times, and you're unlucky, you can see it in action.
One of the qualities that makes this problem so hard to track down is that there is nothing out of the ordinary in any log file. Apache just tells me its handing the request off to Mongrel, nothing in error.log. Mongrel tells me that it redirects the page in less than a second.
Your help is greatly appreciated! Bill
