Slowness in chrome, linked to SEP ext?

[Cody Dirrigle]

I'm really just trying to cover all my bases here and we had two things go on at about the same time:

1. Chrome updated to the latest version 92.0.4515.131 
2. We started to migrate everyone to the sep cloud agent meaning they got the chrome SEP addon

We are now getting growing number of users reporting websites not loading, but only an issue in chrome and not edge. I have done all of the normal chrome stuff and we have hardware acceleration turned off, chrome sync is disabled, cache is cleared on close and they are still seeing the issues so just to cover my bases on the SEP side anyone seeing slowness with chrome since deploying the ext out system wide?  

[Steve Ruffell]

As a guide - on our systems we see a considerable slowdown in Internet bandwidth of an average of when SEP is installed (not specifically related to the Chrome extension - which we disabled anyhow as we do not require it as we have Broadcom WSS - by unchecking 'Enable browser intrusion protection' in 'Intrusion Prevention' Settings of 'Network and Host Exploit Mitigation'.)

As a guide here are typical bandwidth test results which demonstrate this : 

Internet speed test in browser : 
Without SEP or WSS -  95Mbps (on a Virgin media 100Mbps line)
With SEP installed only - 75Mbps
With WSS installed only - 50Mbps
With SEP & WSS installed - 25Mbps
With SEP and WSS and corporate VPN - less than 20Mbps


The overhead associated with WSS (web security proxy filtering) I can understand to a degree as all traffic is redirected through their Google datacentres and all traffic checked, so of course will slow down.  The SEP overhead guess is due to Network filtering and Firewall features.   There has been times though when speeds have gone as low as 1/2 Mbps on that 100 Meg line! with SEP/WSS/VPN enabled.  Pretty unworkable at times.

[Cody Dirrigle]

The internet is not slow, its the loading of pages that is an issue and everything else network wise is fine

Cody Dirrigle

[Jesse Kozikowski]

Slight correction to this. The Chrome SEP extension started going out with the SEP 14.3 RU2 update, which we started deploying on 8/9-ish. We have a couple thousand machines that have been moved to cloud-managed, but the Chrome extension was live as of the RU2 update.

Because we can't simply disable the Chrome extension the only way we can test this is to remove SEP altogether, and even then the problem isn't easily reproducible. We ran the extension in a pilot group for over a month before opening RU2 to the masses, and we never noticed anything. Now that it's out there we have a ton of ticket coming in for Chrome performance issues, and only Chrome performance issues. My immediate thought was this extension, but I don't want anyone getting the idea that completely removing SEP is a good idea.

We have had no issues with the firewall or IPS in the past. In fact, we rely very heavily on IPS and that was always blocking threats for us regardless of the browser used. This new extension is the main change, and it has our users switched to Edge.

[John Owens]

If you disable IPS Browser protection it will place the extension in pass-through mode. Does this improve things?

[mjohn007]

John,

We are seeing the same.  If I turn off the IPS setting in Chrome it still shows the extension installed and enabled.  How do I see if it is bypass?

If I delete the extension it is removed. But the policy change doesn't have the same result of removong th ext in Chrome.

Could you please clarify if I am turning off thriirght policy in the cloud enterprise product?

Mark J.