Recently I noticed a random slowdown of browsing speed. I first thought that it was my browser, Google Chrome, that was the culprit. So, I switch to Safari, but that behaved similarly. I switched to Firefox, which, at first, seemed to be much faster, but after a bit of use it started slowing down randomly.
After lots of troubleshooting at the browser level (including Opera) I concluded that it was something at the OS level. Possibly a memory issue with the networking stack, but that seemed very surprising. Finally, today I was peeking through the OS X Console to see if something might give me a clue, when I saw way too many instances of the following lines.
10/21/12 2:46:51.247 PM acwebsecagent[570]: OnConnectionFailure : Fail Open - Reason = Unable to verify the license key 10/21/12 2:46:51.280 PM acwebsecagent[570]: Connection : Auth key is not provided or is invalid, applying connection failure policy. CMode : 2 TMode : 1
That seemed promising. A quick search revealed that other users were seeing this as well. In their case it was an annoyance in the logs. I decided to try it out. A quick uninstall of the VPN client and a little time on browser made it apparent that this was in fact the culprit.
I need Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility client for work so uninstalled the client and then reinstalled with the following the settings and so far the browsers have started behaving normally. Make sure that you uncheck “Web Security”.
