I work at a company where we have some internally developed web applications. The users use IE9 to connect to our web servers (which are windows 2008 servers running IIS7). The web applications are a mixture of asp.net and CGI applications. There are probably about 250 internal users.
Periodically, when a user submits a request to the web server, the tab in IE goes white and the little spinner just cycles for several minutes. Ultimately, what comes back is a screen indicating that the connection is lost. If you try to refresh the page, the same thing occurs. If there is another tab open in the same browser, pointing at that same web server, it continues to act normally.
The browsers are IE9, version 9.0.8112.16421. This happens across 32 bit or 64 bit platforms. The connections are https.
When it starts to happen, and I visit the desk of the user, the first thing that I do is to ping the web server, which is accessible and responding. When I start wireshark and try to refresh one of the dead tabs, I see no activity related any https traffic. When I refresh on one of the good tabs, I see the traffic I expect (https connection, tls negotiation, etc). Keep in mind - the dead tab and the good tab are going to the same web site, and are right next to each other in the browser.
If I browse to another web site in the dead tab, it renders normally. If I try to browse back to our internal site using that same tab, it fails to render.
On a final note, for the requests that never render, I don't see any entries in the Microsoft IIS logs on the web server. I don't get any failed request log files. Finally, my profilers and monitors for SQL Server don't indicate any problems.
The stats for segments retransmitted/segments (per second) on the web server look normal, so I don't think it's the network. Due to the lack of wireshark activity for the dead tabs, I think it's a bug in the browser.
This is affecting several users throughout the organization.
Can you give me advice on how to proceed?