Hi Pat,
in the moment we measure with IE 8 a lot and so we use urlblast on agents.
If we switch to IE 9, would you suggest to discard urlblast and use wptdriver for all browsers or is there a drawback with that?
Thanks for an assessment, regards, Nils
I recommend trying it and seeing if it works for you. If so then by all means, it’s a much better and more stable code base. There are a couple of catches to be aware of:
1 - wptdriver doesn’t check PageSpeed scores for IE (the regular WPT optimization checks are still done, just not the pagespeed set)
2 - You need at least one urlblaster instance to render videos. I’m moving the video rendering to the server but that work isn’t done yet.
3 - There are some data fields that are not populated for wptdriver tests yet (URL, # of DNS lookups, # of connections used, count of ok, not-modified, etc, tcp segment counts, outbound packet loss and the GUID for associating results. Most of that isn’t really exposed but if you rely on any of it you will be missing it.
On webpagetest.org you measure IE10 with wptdriver, all other IE-versions with urlblast (if i interpreted getTesters.php correctly).
Is that correct and is there a reason for not measuring all versions with wptdriver?
The main issue is that wptdriver does not have the PageSpeed library included so it can’t generate PageSpeed scores. I’m working on deprecating urlblast though so if you don’t need the PageSpeed scores I would recommend it - wptdriver is MUCH cleaner.
2 - You need at least one urlblaster instance to render videos.
What does that meen, exactly:
Is it adequate to have one urlblaster running on one of the agents of the queues of a wptserver (we doesn’t use video-creation very often)?
So e.g.
- wptserver1
** queue1
*** agent1
*** agent2
*** agent3
** queue2
*** agent3 (urlblaster running just on this agent)
*** agent4
** queue3
*** agent5
The urlblaster creates videos for tests measured with wptdriver, too?
3)
Do the urlblaster needs a correctly configured ini-file so the IE-tests on that agent are measured via urlblast?
Yes, you can have a single urlblaster running anywhere (on one of the test machines with wptdriver as well).
It will render videos regardless of how the test was captured (the server bundles up video rendering jobs and needs something to offload it to).
It does need an ini file that points to the server so that it can poll for and retrieve video rendering jobs but it can point to a bogus location so it doesn’t have to actually do any testing.
I’m working on moving the video rendering to be done on the server so hopefully that requirement will be gone in a few months.
thanks, that works for me so far.