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Problems with SolarWinds behind a Load Balance

We have a Load Balancer in front of our Orion web servers (2 Web servers + 2 Core servers in HA) all pointing to a single SQL Server. Everything has been running mostly fine, but over the last weeks we’ve started seeing some pretty serious performance issues that we haven’t been able to pin down yet.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

SQL queries taking 70–80+ seconds
Frequent CryptographicException events on all Web servers (around ~70 per server per day)
Database Maintenance taking about 1h 22m
Information Service timeouts
Occasional drops in platform availability

While going through the web.config on all Web servers, we noticed this setting:

<machineKey decryptionKey="AutoGenerate" validationKey="AutoGenerate" />

According to Microsoft’s documentation, this might not be ideal in a load-balanced environment, since each server would be generating its own key. I couldn’t find anything in the SolarWinds docs mentioning this specifically, so I’m not sure if this is expected behavior or something we should change.

My questions for the community:

In a load-balanced Orion setup, should the Web servers have a static machineKey instead of AutoGenerate?
Has anyone seen performance issues or strange behavior caused by this?
Is there any official guidance from SolarWinds on machineKey configuration?
Could this AutoGenerate setup be putting extra load on SQL or contributing to the slowdowns?

Any feedback or experience would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Accepted answers

All comments

swaminathan26_

May i know what version you are using ?

cnorborg

Should the version really matter? This probably has nothing to do with the application itself?

l1ghtningVolt

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted 2025.1.1

donrobert5

https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/orionplatform/content/core-load-balancer-requirements.htm

There is a disclaimer though.

SolarWinds is not responsible for configuration or troubleshooting of customer load balancers. If issues arise in the use of load balancers, SolarWinds recommends that you reach out to your load balancer vendor.

Lofstrand

If you go directly towards one of the webservers, do you still have the same issue? If so it is probably not the LB.
Also, the maintenance job that take a long time, makes me think there is a SQL issue rather than the LB.

l1ghtningVolt

When using only a single server, no issues appear during normal operation of the program. The major problem occurs when using the “default” access (where the load balancer is located). When the platform goes down, the Event Viewer shows an error with the message: “An error occurred while dispatching a duplicated socket: this handle is now leaked in the process.”

There is also a recurring error in the Event Viewer from IIS APPPOOL\SolarWinds Orion Application Pool that says: “Exception type: CryptographicException Exception message: Error occurred during a cryptographic operation.”
This error occurs extremely frequently — Event sequence: 3269, Event occurrence: 172. I attached screenshots of the errors.

By connecting both events, I reached the conclusion that the issue may be related to how the load balancer interacts with the servers.

Lofstrand

Ok, but db maintenance has nothing to do with the webservers.