We are experiencing an issue regarding too many OCSP validation request hit VeriSign server in a short period of time, after investigation, we have found the root cause of this issue is turning on JRE 6u18 Auto Update. When user accept to update JRE to 6u18 using Auto Update mechanism, a JRE online installer will running, in the end of it, a Java webstart application will start to do JavaFX pre-load, in the pre-load process, we are verifying the signature of those JavaFX jar file, which will trigger the OCSP validation of JavaFX certificate.

Because Auto Update is happening at the same time cross the world, that is why VeriSign notice a big spike volume of OCSP validation in a short period of time.