Extreme newbie questions

WebPageTest General Discussion
1

Hi everyone. I was searching for “ssl handshake latency” when I stumbled across this site. I am hoping this will help me with troubleshooting issues at a couple of customer sites.

  1. I have outlying sites in AK that use satellite Internet (which is hardwired from Anchorage back to the continental US). They are unable to log in to our website. I know they have 15 Mbps bandwidth and are showing 600ms up and down for latency. I am curious if latency could be causing a handshake timeout of some kind and thought maybe webpagetest might help? I wasn’t sure how I would test this…do I have to change the Advanced Settings to “Custom” and then what? Is this just mimicking what my customers are experiencing and would it give me info on latency? Or is there a way to have the customers test it themselves using this site?
  2. I have another site where they are having issues with loading videos. They said they can view all videos, just not ours (some of which is hosted at a special site because of using old, non-html5 files). Again, I am curious if this webpagetest would help troubleshoot issues at that site. Again, do I have the customers run the test and provide me the results to decipher or do I remote in and do it for them?

Sorry these questions are so basic, but I read through what I thought was documentation and couldn’t figure out whether this will help me or not, or even how to properly test for satellite and so forth.

Any advice/information would be helpful. Thank you in advance for your time!

Hanna

2

#1:
WPT can simulate different Network conditions but, it is just that - a simulation. It cannot mimic the exact satellite internet kind of connection and its associated latency and packet loss.

#2:
WPT can only give you a screen shot of the final rendered page. So you will know if the video placeholder has some content or if it appears blank. However, if this is happening on any browser, you should be able to test it as well.

I guess the issue you are running into is a combination of network bandwidth problem coupled with geo specific issues. The best bet would be to test from similar browser from the same geo location as the end user having issues. If all else fails, you can do a screen share with the customer and then monitor your logs to see if there are errors.

The use case you have is not totally related to WPT but it could help if the locations and browser combination are available.

3

Thanks for responding, akshayranganath.

For #2, you are saying this is do-able if I can get them to run webpagetest while logged in and loading the videos they are having issues with? Or what other logs are you referring to?

4

I guess you could try to write a WPT script to do a login and then capture the screen shot of the final rendered page. This would show if the video component loaded or if it failed.

Like I mentioned, this test case is only useful if there is a WPT agent+browser combination that is similar to the one that has issues. Hope this helps.