LDAP UME Failover

Hello,

I need some clarification on the UME LDAP settings for EP6 SR1 SP9 on WAS 6.40.

We have three Novell LDAP servers setup for user authentication, call them L1, L2, & L3. Now in the SAP J2EE Engine Config Tool, under UME LDAP data, we have the Server Name field filled in with L1,L2,L3 and the Server Port field filled with 636,636,636. We have it set this way for failover, according to the SAP docs and it works, in a LDAP failure scenario.

But, we had an issue yesterday, where L1 didn't necessarily fail, but was having problems of some kind (we're still investigating those) but it appeared that the processor was pegged at 100% for several hours. At no time when L1 was having problems, were we unable to ping the box. But, during this time, the portal was completely unresponsive. When we would navigate to the logon page, we would just get a blank white screen and that was it. It never showed the logon nor did it ever time out.

So, in this scenario, where L1 is still up, but very busy, does the portal continue trying to access it instead of just failing over to the configured alternatives? It appears that may have been the issue.

Also, FYI, when we set this environment up, we did test this failover configuration and it worked as expected. But in testing, we made sure the LDAP server in question was completely unavailable to the portal environment as opposed to what we saw yesterday.

Has anyone else experienced this type of failure?

Thanks!