Delayed or problematic logins when coming internationally

Hi,
Another issue we discovered while doing QA - when a user is logging in internationally (e.g. Australia) there appears to be some sort of delay in login that prevents a login from taking place. Here is the issue:

Our login flow:
Login with Facebook (fb only profile) =>Welcome to the system landing page (article in Joomla) =>Edit Profile page in Jomsocial (jomsocial)

Issue with International login flow:
Login with Facebook (fb only profile) =>Welcome to the system landing page (article in Joomla) =>JOOMLA REDIRECT TO JOOMLA LOGIN SCREEN=>Edit Profile page in Jomsocial (jomsocial)

Yet if the page is refreshed, or you manually go to any registered user only page, you appear to be logged in, and it appears that this is likely a delay in processing the fb login that takes longer to go through than it takes joomla to log in (or something of this sort).

Note: when using regular jomsocial login this does not happen, also when using the jomsocial fb login it also does not happen. Something in JFBC is affecting the login.

This does not appear to be happening from the U.S. or servers nearby, but there is some delay when prcessing the data from abroad. Is there a timeout setting or something that we can set that would alleviate this issue?

Please help us fix this. Thank you!

It looks like it may be possible to change the settings in : jfbcchannel.php - but I am afraid to mess with it without knowing what to set it to. Let me know if that's the issue. Thanks again!

p.s.
We're almost at launch, and these JFBC issues are the final ones that will let us get our product out. Once we get it out, I'll publish something about all the issues/solutions we've had to go through to get this out, hopefully it will be helpful.

It's not a browser issue, and nothing is hanging. The issue is that when the user logs in and is redirected to the intermediate page, when they click the button to go on to their profile, they get taken back to login because the system has evidently not seen that they have been logged in. But if they refresh the page or go to the URL directly, they are logged in. There is some kind of disconnect, my guess was that there is a delay, but it may be something else. Any thoughts?

If you don't see any visible delays or hangs on pages, it's likely not a communication issue, but more of a session issue. A session is a row stored in the database about a user that specifies who they are, if they're logged in, etc.
-Ok, that makes sense (see bottom)

For the "Welcome to the system landing page (article in Joomla)" page, is that the page you have setup for the "Returning User Redirection" in JFBConnect?
-Yes

On that page, is the user properly logged in at that point?

-Seems to be. Their username is displayed on the page (we pull that username through the Jomsocial plugin), but once they click through to the edit-profile page they are directed to login.

Do you have multiple servers, CDNs, or other things that would split the load of your server? All I can think of is that the user is registering and their session is properly created on one server, but it's not being properly sync'd with another.

We don't have any of that per-se, but we are running on MediaTemple Grid Hosting, and they are not the greatest and maybe that's the delay/MySQL replication issue that's occuring.

If you think this would affect the login issues, I would make a bet that this is the cause. Possibly a faster (non-grid) host may be in order. Does that make sense, or am I grasping at straws?

Thanks again, we're getting to the bottom of the barrel on issues and going for launch.

Thank you very much for your help. The follow up answers are below, but I think that if having distributed databases may have an effect on the session, then the issue is MediaTemple where we are on Grid hosting (aka distributed) and where the MySQL dbase is on a dedicated (separate) container.

alzander wrote: 1) How does the user go from the landing page to the JomSocial edit page? Is that the only link the user could go to? (this is why I want the URL, to sort of see the process myself).

- Yes, that is the only link they can click and we tested by only clicking only that link: the syntax of link is to /jomsocialhomedirectory/profile/edit/

alzander wrote: 2) If you set the Returning User Redirection and/or the page after that redirection (currently to the JS edit profile page) to somewhere else, does the same problem happen?

-Not sure actually, that's the one thing we havent tested, i think yes, but not certain - will have them test it

alzander wrote: 3) Check to make sure that each page of your site in that process either has, or doesn't have the www. It shouldn't be mixed where some pages have it and others don't.

-All the urls are sans-WWW (http://url)

alzander wrote: 4) Is this consistently happening from wherever you're testing?

-It is consistently happening only from abroad (Australia - from multiple machines and connections) and in fact i cannot replicate it from the U.S., but have been on screen-sharing where I've seen it consistently happen.

alzander wrote: Can you send me the URL of a page to test with? I can't find one offhand.

-I am in the midst of tearing apart the login process to make way for LinkedIn login, so it is all broken for the next few hours. That said, I will PM you the link

Thanks for taking a look. That test site is in disarray at the moment (the top links are temporary and will be going away etc). Meanwhile I will try to do some additional testing in different ways and let you know what comes of it.

Still, we've had issues with MediaTemple dbases/grid hosting before and i wouldn't be at all surprised if some obscure delay was responsible. The production site is going onto a dedicated server and i am hoping that maybe that will resolve the issue. Will keep you posted.