actual status of nodejs agent?

WebPageTest General Discussion
1

Hi Pat,

we are using an adapted version of the node.js agent capable of multistep measurements (see fork GitHub - IteraSpeed/webpagetest: Fork with multistep capability for node.js agent). Unfortunately we have some trouble getting our measurements stable. We have a lot of failing tests and error logs which are hard to read/understand.

So we consider to integrate your HEAD into our code or mybe re-implement multistep functionality on top of the HEAD (looks like you refactored great parts of the application completely).
What is the actual state of the node.js agent? Would you call ist stable? In our version, 50% success test rate would be a lot (with customer journey tests with multiple pages). What are your experiences?

Another question: For iOS tests we use another solution (adapted mobitest app by Guy Podjarny). It would be nice to use same solution for both platforms. Can the node.js agent be used for iOS devices by now? We haven’t tested that so far and in your wiki it’s still called work in progress.

Thanks in advance for advice and still thanks for sharing your work on webpagetest.
Regards, Nils

2

I run the node agent with iOS, biggest problem i have so far is that on some sites the zipping of the results consumes huge amount of RAM (10Mb files consuming 4GB RAM to zip)

I’m planning on swapping the JS based zip code to native just need to find a bit of time to work on it.

Are you using the original MobiTest or have you moved to WKWebView?

3

Hi Andy,
unfortunately we are not yet utilizing WKWebKit for rendering the webpages and are still on UIWebView which has caused a lot of pain during implementation. We forked the mobitest app a couple of years back and added multistep functionality and further measurements ourselves.

4

The Node agent has been running for several months on WPT for the iOS agents with no significant issues. It’s still a work-in-progress because I’m REALLY not happy about the fact that it requires a dedicated Mac for every phone (if doing video capture). Other than that it should work well.

I’m planning on tackling miltistep in WPT-proper (finally) this quarter and scripting in the node agents will be this quarter or next so hopefully your fork won’t be needed too much longer.

5

I was looking at WKWebView last night and it seems you can’t intercept the network requests.

That said I wonder how Chrome on iOS does it these days

6

It doesn’t. No more Chrome network stack in the request path on iOS :frowning: