Required but not granted http access to 216.34.181.97 slows phpmyadmin down

Question

I use a recently freshly installed phpmyadmin 4.0.5 for the administration of databases on a server with a rather restrictive firewall.

In the firewall logs I see that phpmyadmin tries to open an http connection to the address 216.34.181.97 - which belongs to sourceforge. Probably, this connection is required to look for and display update information.

Now what bothers me is the following:

When I block this connection by the firewall I experience that phpmyadmin does not react for around 1 minute when I directly after a login want to list up all tables of a database. After the "waiting time" everything runs as quickly as expected again.

When I allow for a http connection to 216.34.181.97 the initial slow down of phpmyadmin does not happen. This can be reproduced.

I saw some questions on some internet forums regarding a similar initial slow down of phpmyadmin - but these questions never were answered sufficiently.

So I post some questions here:

Question 1: Is the http connection only for looking for updates ??? Or is there more going on ??

Question 2: Can someone confirm the described behaviour of phpmyadmin?

Question 3: Should this inital automatic trial to get a connection to sourceforge not be handled differently by the phpmyadmin developers in future releases? At least it should not delay user interactions after the login ...

Question 4: Is there a parameter setting by which I can eliminate the trial to connect to sourceforge?

Answer 1

1. It's just for version check

2. Confirmed

3. There is a parameter to bypass the version check: https://phpmyadmin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/config.html#cfg_VersionCheck

Also, the version check can be done via a proxy, see https://phpmyadmin.readthedocs.org/en/latest/config.html#cfg_VersionCheckProxyUrl and the parameters that follow.

Answer 2

Adding $cfg['VersionCheck'] = false; to the "config.inc.php" file, doesn't seem to solve the problem. You can always delete - or comment out - the code responsible directly in "config.default.php" file, but I wouldn't recommend it.
The best way I found to avoid the OP issue is to change the VERSION_CHECK_DEFAULT definition in the "vendor_config.php" file to false, define('VERSION_CHECK_DEFAULT', false); thus when the following code in "config.default.php" checks for it

if (defined('VERSION_CHECK_DEFAULT')) {
    $cfg['VersionCheck'] = VERSION_CHECK_DEFAULT;
 } else {
    $cfg['VersionCheck'] = true;
}

the 'VersionCheck' will be assign to 'false', skipping the connection to 216.34.181.97.
I've tested it on Windows, but it should equally work on *nix systems.