Hey Webi community,
As some of you will already know, Java 7 update 25 was recently released. The Web Intelligence RIA (aka Rich Internet Applet or Java Report Panel) is heavily reliant on the client-side JRE so we are always cautious when testing the latest versions from Oracle.
This latest release appears to have some changes in it that do negatively impact the load time on some BI landscapes. I've covered them briefly below and have gone into a bit more detail in the reference Knowledge Base Article.
DETAILS:
Java 7u25 made a major change to the way it will check Certificate Revocation by default. In previous versions, it checked the local Certificate Revocation Lists to see if any of the signed certificates were revoked. In this latest version however, it utilizes Online Certification Status Protocol (OCSP) to check the certificates. What this essentially means is that for each of the 60+ jar files that comprize the RIA, the JRE will go out to the ocsp.verisign.com servers to check the validity of the certificates and to see if they have been flagged as revoked. On fast networks, this check might only take 1/10 of a second per jar file so you may not notice but on landscapes that have complex and distributed network configurations (VPNs, WANs, Proxies, Firewalls, etc...) this can add several seconds on to each jar file.
Some customers have shown us a 2-3 minute increase in load time which is pretty substantial.
The good news is that it's fairly easy to roll back this seting to pre 7u25 settings and it shouldn't make your system any less secure than it was running previous JRE versions.
KBA 1904873 - Web Intelligence Rich Internet Applet loads slower after installing Java 7 Update 25 (JRE 7u25+)
For other types of client side performance issues, check out my blog and wiki posts from a few weeks back.
Also, for more info on these changes to JRE 7u25 - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/7u25-relnotes-1955741.html#certrev
Thanks
Jb
