Whilst working with a SharePoint 2013 environment I experienced slow page load times and poor search performance.  After initial page loads performance was fine for several minutes before the performance issue returned.

Opening the Application log within Event Viewer showed the following critical error with the text

“A certificate validation operation took 30015.2428 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold.  If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue.  Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246987 for more details.”

The fix for the problem is to export the SharePoint Root Authority certificate using PowerShell and import it into the Trusted Root Certificate store.  Open the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell as an administrator.

$SProotCert = (Get-SPCertificateAuthority).RootCertificate
$SProotCert.Export(“Cer”) | Set-Content C:\SProotCert.cer –Encoding Byte

Open the Certificates MMC by opening a Run command and type MMC.  Choose File -> Add/Remove Snap-in.  Select the Certificates Snap-in and click Add.  On the next screen select Computer account and click Next followed by Local computer and Ok.

Right-click on Trusted Root Certificates and choose All Tasks -> Import

Complete the wizard by loading the certificate you exported using PowerShell.  Repeat the process on all SharePoint servers experiencing the issue.

These steps fixed the error on most of our SharePoint servers, but it remained on two.  In order to fix the error on the two remaining servers I configured proxy access through Internet Explorer, then from an elevated command prompt ran “netsh winhttp import proxy source=ie”  This configures Windows to use the IE proxy configuration as a default.  The servers were then able to access the internet and verify the certificates.