Crystal Reports Slow Load Using .NET C# ( SetDataSource )

I tried to create a title that would come up in a search engine as this problem has cause me hours and hours of grief.

I developed an application that used the crystal reports sdk to generate some reports. I pull the data from SQL Server into a .NET data set. Make some changes to the data then make a nice print out using crystal reports.

In development everything was quick. The app would load in a few seconds. In production however the first time the report ran it would take a good 2 minutes to load.

It was hung for about a minute loading the report and another minute on SetDataSource.

I tried everything I could imagine. I thought it was some sort of .NET or COM issue. I reinstalled .NET, removed heaps of programs. Removed Acrobat reader. Installed .NET 3.5 SP1 .NET 2.0 SP1

I eventually downloaded process mon ( filemon ) from microsoft to see exactly what the program was doing before it stopped. It was somewhere in crystal.

Then it went quick and loaded in seconds WTF! How could installing a monitoring tool fix the problem? I rebooted and it was back to it’s slow self. Even in filemon. It paused just after reading the internet explorer settings from the registry.

Then it hit me. I opened the firewall to the production server to download filemon and that was what fixed the problem.

A quick check of the logs showed me that the server was trying to access: CRL.VERISIGN.NET

That is the certificate recovation list for verisign. .NET checks for revoked certificates before it will load some signed assembelies.

http://osdir.com/ml/encryption.general/2004-01/msg00065.html

You can open your firewall or there are some instructions to disable the check here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3945951&SiteID=1

Some other people with the same problem:

http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=350528

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Database/Reporting_/Crystal_Reports/Q_23392678.html