The OnCommand System Manager by NetApp has been a thorn in our sides since its creation.
The buggy interface and extremely slow performance has pushed us to using the CLI for every task. Despite the bugs and latency we still find ourselves using it for LUN creation on a daily basis, suffering through the long load times.
As of version 2.0.2, much of the bugs have been worked out, but by default the interface is still slow. The average time it takes for the System Info tab to populate after login is around 14 seconds.
After troubleshooting the issues with wireshark we found that the issue was in fact DNS resolution. The GUI is built upon requests that first attempt to be resolved by DNS before failing to the IP.The requests are sent sequentially, not concurrently thus further delaying the GUI output.
The solution is simple, add an A record or an entry in your host file to force resolution.
The performance change is staggering. We went from a 14 second load time of the System Info tab down to 2 seconds.
