New Webpagetest user questions

Nice tool. Much appreciation to everyone involved.

I have looked thru the documentation and forum a bit and have a few questions …

  1. Why would anyone install a private instance instead of using the central server all the time?

  2. If installing a private instance, I see the test agents referenced as being installed on Windows servers. Can it just be installed a Windows 7 desktop? Does it have to be Windows Server?

  3. Do you have to have a different physical agent for each web browser you want to test? Or can we put IE8, 9 etc, Chrome multi versions, Firefox, etc all on one Windows 7 desktop as the testing agent?

  4. If we install a private instance, initially we would like to put the web server on a Red Hat VM and one test agent on a Windows 7 VM. Any problems with that?

Thanks

There are a bunch of reasons:

  • Test intranet or dev sites from behind a firewall
  • Use the API for automated testing (beyond the very low limits that I allow on the public instance)
  • Control over the infrastructure (I don’t provide any SLAs and there is no guarantee of consistency from location to location since the hardware is provided by the community).

Desktop is fine, sorry for the confusion. All of the Dulles agents are on Windows 7 Home edition for example and there is a mix including XP, Windows 8, Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2012 and probably a few more that I’m forgetting (32 and 64-bit).

Yes and No. For every different version of IE you need a different OS install (can be VM or physical machine). Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari can all co-exist on the same machine.

For Chrome you can have one version of stable and one version of canary that co-exist and for Firefox you can have as many as you’d like (though if you use the server-pushed updates you just get a rolling version of the stable release).

Nope, that should work fine. I mostly use Ubuntu/Debian so there may be some setup idiosyncrasies that need to be worked through on Red Hat but it should “just work”. I just remember someone opening a bug several years back about an issue on CentOS so just ping me if you see any issues and I’ll get it fixed.