Dashboard containing Projects Portlet does not display in Internet Explorer if many (100+) projects and over slow network

If there is a slow network connection between web browser and the box running JIRA, and if the JIRA instance has many projects (of the order of 100 or more), and if the user has the Projects Portlet on their dashboard, then the dashboard does not display in Internet Explorer 6 and 7. It works fine in Firefox.

The browser (Internet Explorer) renders the header - the logo and the Home | Browse Projects | Find Issues | Create New Issue, but then not the rest of the dashboard page.

The browser appears to try to reload the page a few times. This is apparent because the page briefly flashes and the "Waiting for <URL>" text at the bottom of the browser seems to redisplay. Sometimes there is first a "Website found. Waiting for reply." message briefly displayed in the message window at the bottom of the browser. The browser tries this several times, sometimes for 30 seconds or so, sometimes for several minutes, before finally giving up, displaying a popup window saying:

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site <URL>.
Operation aborted.

This behaviour is readily reproducible using a local import of http://developer.atlassian.com/jira and using TCPMon to simulate a slow network connection. Use the following delay settings in TCPMon:

Bytes per pause: 1024
Delay in Milliseconds: 50

The behaviour is also readily observable on http://developer.atlassian.com/jira (if you add the Projects Portlet to your dashboard, or create a new dashboard page containing the Projects Portlet). The problem was previously reported by two (separate) support customers. In their cases it only appears on slow links.

The behaviour is not observable on the local import of http://developer.atlassian.com/jira if you do not use the delay.

It is interesting to note that at the times when the browser seems to be trying to reload the page, the shell running TCPMon displays the following error:

java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
        at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite0(Native Method)
        at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:92)
        at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:136)
        at org.apache.ws.commons.tcpmon.SocketRR.run(SocketRR.java:213)

Microsoft has a bug report for the above error message: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/927917. However that bug relates to Javascript, specifically to when a child container HTML element contains script code that tries to modify the parent container element of the child container. It is unlikely that this bug is the cause of our error, as you can turn off Javascript in IE and comment out all Javascript and links to Javascript files in the served page, and the error still occurs.

We tried saving the static page back on the server (do a View Source in Firefox after the page is successfully displayed, then save it back to the server), and then accessing it. Same error occurs.

We tried another page that is about the same size - ~900K - and it displays correctly. So the error is content specific. Perhaps it is related to nested tables?

We spent significant time trying to find the root cause and have been unable to. As there are straightforward workarounds, we will not spend any more time on it at this stage.

The workarounds are either:

• Don't use the Projects Portlet in the dashboard if you have lots of projects. If you want links to projects on your dashboard, consider using the Project Table portlet instead.
• Use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.