User Application : This portlet did not respond in time.

When administering the User Application, various frames would not display and instead were replaced with a message "This portlet did not respond in time!"

 

The following error was seen in the user application log:

INFO  [EboPortalAggregationHelper] Request timed out or didn't produce a response. Filling in default response:

 

This error occurs if there is a portlet on the page that is taking too long to respond or render than other portlets. The User Application will display that message in the spot where the portlet should have displayed.  This done by design so the whole page will not be blank. Normally just refreshing the browser will correct this.

 

Investigation is needed to determine why the portlet is taking too long to retrieve the data it requires, which may come from a backend application.

 

In this case the problem was caused by LDAP requests to eDirectory taking too long.

The problem was resolved by indexing the eDirectory attribute "objectClass" on the server the User Application sending its LDAP queries to.