Microsoft Project Server and High Latency

As part of a consultancy job for a client, I was asked to figure out why a Microsoft Project Server installation, would start behaving oddly when accessed from a remote company's site. The M$ consultant, started raving about how there was something wrong with the authentication system (which is based on Samba 3.0.x and which I currently maintain) or that it was probably the Ipsec VPN between the main site and the remote site. I started double-checking the VPN, the samba logs, and pretty much anything else that could possibly have an impact. At a certain point, I excluded pretty much every aspect I was in charge of. The M$ guy, still insisted something is wrong on our VPN, so I decide to set up another one with our office... The server wouldn't work there either. You could log in, start doing stuff, but as soon as you clicked on _Projects _you'd get a blank page instead of the crappy ActiveX-gantt chart you were supposed to get. Then I stumble into this gem from Microsoft:

Latency becomes an issue if you need to move large amounts of data over the WAN connection,




such as when a Project Professional user opens a project. For most organizations, WAN




performance is acceptable if latency does not exceed 30 ms. Regardless of bandwidth, if




your WAN connections have a latency of above 30 ms, you might need to use Terminal Server.

So after a lot of cursing, the bottom line is Microsoft Project Server doesn't work if your network latency is higher than 30ms. This, just to show a tiny pathetic Gantt ActiveX control. I'm sure sniffing all the RPC calls involved would reveal some first-class programming there ;)