[IUG] proxying patroninfo pages

["Ball, Donald A Jr \(Library\)" <donald dot ball at nashville dot gov>]

Hi folks. I'm working on a solution for single sign-on of patrons across
our public web server and our catalog server (Millenium, naturally).
We'd like patrons to be able to set preferences for event notifications
and the like, but we don't want them to have to login twice, once for
each server. We'd also like to be able to offer patrons the ability to
store their credentials in persistent cookies so they don't have to
reauthenticate from their home computers if they don't want.

My current approach is thus: the patron login page is now hosted on the
web server. When the patron provides their credentials, either via form
or via persistent cookies, the web server acts as a web client and
authenticates them to the catalog server. Assuming authentication is
successful, I take the resulting SESSION_ID cookie, give it a domain
value which encompasses both servers, and pass it along to the client.
It works like a charm, the client happily passes the cookie to the
catalog server when making requests to it, and the catalog server
happily honors the cookie, even though the ip address from which it was
created suddenly changed.

My problem is thus: when performing load tests on the new patron
authentication system, generally requests are handled in a second or
two, but occasionally they can take up to 25-30 seconds. Poking through
my logs, I note that it's the requests behind the scenes from the web
server to the catalog server that are being handled slowly. Moreover,
it's not just one URL which is being handled slowly... Sometime's its
the GET request to /patroninfo, sometimes it's the GET request to
/PATRONAPI/barcode, sometimes the GET request to
/PATRONAPI/barcode/pin/pintest.

I'm wondering... a. if anyone else has done something similar and/or b.
is the catalog server perhaps throttling service to the web server,
perhaps noticing that it's received too many requests from that one ip
address recently?

Thanks in advance for any tips.

- donald