Google Cloud Compute Images for WPT Agent

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

Hi there

We already use WPT Agent AMIs and they work beautifully. But has anyone done any work to create Google Cloud Compute Images for WPT agent available? (If not I can possibly share our Image once I manage to get it working). The site we wish to monitor is hosted in AWS so we thought it would be a good idea to monitor it from outside of AWS as well.

I know its fairly easy to create Private Machine Images in Google Compute but I can’t seem to get the traffic shaping to work. I have seen some threads in this forum where others have run into the same issue. This thread says ipfw does not work on 64bit Windows but I can see WPT Agent AMI ami-a3a81dd0 seems to be built with 64bit windows as well (where obviously traffic shaping works fine).

I have tried almost everything to make sure Google Image is exactly the same as the said AMI but haven’t had any luck yet. May be I am overlooking something and I’ll be able to solve this eventually but was checking to see if someone has already solved this issue and tell me if

  1. there is a Google Cloud Compute Image for WPT Agent
  2. or has some pointers on how to solve this
2

GCE doesn’t allow for image sharing yet (that I’m aware of). Once it does I hope to make public images available.

Traffic-shaping should work fine on 64-bit Windows. Some things that I can think of that might cause it to not shape:

One thing to watch out for on the setup is that the GCE servers do not have graphics attached so the only way to run an actual desktop is through RDP. This gets a bit convoluted to set up but it means you need to have the VM start an RDP session to 127.0.0.2 (localhost but not on the black-list for RDP) and then run the test agent inside of the RDP session.

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btw, if you just need outside-of-EC2 testing, it might be easier to bring an instance up on Azure for right now since they do have Graphics attached and it is basically just following the server install directions.

I had done some work on public Azure images and just need to carve out some time to re-visit it.

4

Hi Patrick - many thanks for your super swift response.

I have managed to get wpt agent working (without traffic shaping) using GCE graphics hack suggested - so no problems there.

To answer your first query re dummynet installation - yes I did follow all the steps mentioned carefully and in exact same order suggested (link to video). But once dummynet is installed

  1. Windows RDP session becomes very sluggish and
  2. all tests start to timeout as dummynet installation seems to reduce the upload speed down to 0.05MBPS regardless what traffic shaping values you insert. I have attached a brief youtube video (~1 minute length) of me attempting to install dummynet (if you can kindly review).

Not sure if this is of any help but wptdriver.exe does pick up the tests and run them as expected but the tests timeout as there is not much but upload speed to work with.

I’ll checkout Azure as well to see if it helps.

Thanks again.

5

Hmm, could be that the windows servers are using a paravirtual driver that doesn’t play nice with dummynet :frowning:

We have the same issue with newer images on EC2 (except all networking breaks). I’m just starting work on a replacement driver for Dummynet that uses newer Windows API’s and will work with windows 10 as well and it might just have to wait until I have that finished (hopefully not more than a few weeks).

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Sounds very interesting and will look forward to the update. Many thanks for your help with this.

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FWIW, the agents work fine on GCE now with the Windows 2016 server images and the switch to winshaper for traffic-shaping (in the 3.0 release). Unfortunately you still need to build images yourself because there isn’t support for publicly sharing images but I can confirm the agents work fine.

There is also the new Linux agent (wptagent) that is ~1/5 the cost to run in the cloud if you only need to test Chrome: GitHub - WPO-Foundation/wptagent: Cross-platform WebPageTest agent