I’m building out a Private Instance of WebPageTest and want to make sure that I get the most out of my hardware.
I use Windows Server 2008 R2 on my host machine and Hyper-V as my VM controller. There is a VM for the WPT web server and separate VMs will be created for the WPT agents.
My goal is to have agents for IE6, IE7, and IE8 on Windows XP, plus IE8 and IE9 on Windows 7. In the future, I’ll want two additional agents for coverage of latest Chrome (when all functionality is implemented) and latest Firefox (when it exists :)) on Windows 7. Most test runs will have video capture enabled and some will have dynaTrace captures (once that is configurable per-test instead of per-agent) enabled.
The relevant system hardware is:
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[]Intel Xeon W3550 (3GHz, 4 cores / 8 threads, 8MB cache)
[]12GB RAM
[]2TB Hard Drive
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Questions:
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[]What resources should I allocate to the WPT web server? Does it consume a lot of resources when scheduling / analyzing jobs for many agents?
[]About how much hard drive space will thousands (let’s say 10,000) of test runs take? More generally, I’m looking to figure out if I should dedicated 100GB vs 500GB to the web server.
[]What resources should I allocate for the Windows XP agent VMs?
[]What resources should I allocate for the Windows 7 agent VMs?
[]Do agent machines consume a lot of disk space? Are results discarded from them after they get uploaded back to the web server?
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Any help would be very much appreciated! Thanks for making such a great piece of software available for everyone’s benefit 
Nick
1 - The web server barely needs any resources. Most of the work it does is when you actually view a test result (generating waterfalls, thumbnails, etc). The analyzing is done on the test agents. If you can, Linux seems to do a lot better with the image manipulating than Windows for some reason but both work fine.
2 - When you are doing video capture, it depends heavily on the site you are measuring because a screen shot is stored (low resolution) for each time the screen changes. Your best bet is to measure for your use case and extrapolate. The space for video capture dwarfs the space used by the test data so it isn’t something I can estimate easily.
3 - For the XP VM’s, I usually allocate 512MB Ram and just enough disk space to install the OS and give it a little working room (8GB or so).
4 - For Windows 7 I allocate 1GB of RAM and 12GB HDD.
5 - No, the agents are stateless and don’t consume much disk space beyond the initial install (just some working files and browser cache). Once the results are uploaded everything is nuked locally.
FWIW, the Chrome (and Firefox) agents can run on the same machine as the IE testing (the software makes sure it is only running one of them at a time) so you don’t need new VM’s for those unless you want dedicated capacity.
Thanks,
-Pat
Ah, good to hear. Sounds like I have a powerful enough machine, then I was worried I might be trying to cram too much on one box, but it looks like I’ll be okay!
Any news on when Firefox might be coming? Just curious, not looking for a hard release date or anything.
Firefox will be in the next month or so (basic support - no SSL or scripting). Basically equivalent to the current Chrome support.