SQL Server Management studio painfully slow

Oopps! Upgrade your browser pretty please. Oopps! Upgrade your browser pretty please.

This week I have had a problem at a client, with a newly installed server with Windows 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005 on it being very slow and sluggish when we logged on to it and ran the SQL Server management tools. We could not find anything obvious wrong with the server, or SQL Server.

In the end it turned out that the root cause of the problem was hard to find, but very easy to solve. The cause was that the SQL Server management binaries are digitally signed. So when we started the Management Studio for example, windows wanted to check if the certificate used to sign the sqlwb.exe file had expired. And since this server did not have an internet connection, it waited, waited and waited. It seems there was a time out after about 10 – 30 seconds. And even within SSMS some functions kicks off other binaries wich then suffered form the same initial “hanging” feeling.

The solution was actually to go to the Internet Explorer Advanced Settings, and uncheck “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation”. Then the system immediately went into its expected “snappy” feeling.