no test results / failed test

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

Hi,
I have installed web page test on my PC running Windows XP. I have IE 7.

I can start urlBlast and it appears to be fine. I can also run your web application locally, and run a test for a particular URL to be tested.

After a few seconds, a browser will appear, but no page is loaded. After a second or two, it fails (blank browser), with “about:blank” in the URL bar.

If I look at the test results it basically tells me that everything took 0 seconds, and 0 KB were loaded. So it looks like the test failed.

If (during a test), I replace “about:blank” in the browser with the web site URL I’m trying to test, then it does navigate to that page. But the test results are as described above.

I have noticed that the plug-in CIEHook is installed in my browser. Interestingly, while this is enabled I cannot browse any websites at all from IE. The browser is rendered useless. I notice that this plug-in is written by yourself. So I have disabled the plug-in. I’m wondering if this is the cause of my problem. However, whether I disable or enable the plug in I still encounter the problems described above.

Any help on this would be gratefully appreciated!

Many thanks,
Martin[hr]
A further observation is that I notice urlBlast is looking here: http://127.0.0.1/work/.

If I try to navigate to this URL in a browser, I get “403 Forbidden: You don’t have permission to access /work/ on this server.” Unsure if this is expected behaviour, or a hint that I have something set up wrong.

My urlblast.ini looks like this:

[Configuration]

; Type of test (cached, uncached or both) - setting is global for all threads
; 0 = Both (clears cache, loads web page then loads it again
; 1 = uncached (clears the cache before every page)
; 2 = cached (never clears the cache)
; 4 = pagetest-only mode
Test Type=4

; Startup delay (in seconds)
Startup Delay=1

; Log file - _iewtr.txt and iewpg.txt will be appended automatically
; %MACHINE% can be used as a placeholder for the local machine name
Log File=C:\Program Files\WebPageTest\Web Site\log\urlBlast%MACHINE%

; Number of simultaneous browsers to run
Thread Count=1

; Test user account info. A number will be added to the end of the account for each thread
; so “user” becomes “user1”, “user2”, etc. If not specified the default is:
;account=user
;password=2dialit

; Location information for fetching work
; This is currently set up assuming the web server and test machine are the same
; If the we server is separate, change the url to point to the correct server
Url Files Url=http://127.0.0.1/work/
Location=Test_Ethernet
Location Key=TestKey123

; Maximum number of seconds to allow for a page load before timing out
Timeout=120

; Reboot after X minutes of running (0 = disable reboot interval)
Reboot Interval=0

; Number of days between clearing the cache for all users (including the user profiles and running a disk defrag)
; This is only checked at startup so if you never reboot this won’t happen
Clear Cache Interval=30

; Exit after X complete runs through the url list 0 = don’t exit
Exit runs=0

; For Server 2003 or Vista and later we have to host IE in our own exe
; on XP you can comment this out and it will use iexplore.exe
;browser=pagetest.exe

2

Yes, the CIEHook plugin needs to be active. It is responsible for navigating the browser and capturing the results. An easy work around is to uncomment the browser= line in urlblast.ini which will launch a custom browser instance that doesn’t rely on the plugin but it would be nice to figure out why the plugin doesn’t play nicely with your browser.

What other plugins do you have installed?

3

Thanks Pat,
Uncommenting ‘browser=’ in urlblast.ini did the trick in that it now works with the pagetest.exe browser.

However I’d really like to get it to work with IE, so if you have any ideas I’d be very grateful. I assume that the browser launched automatically by urlblast would have the CIEHook plugin enabled even if I’ve manually disabled the plugin? I only ask as I get the same problem whether I’ve disabled the plugin or not, which strikes me as odd.

I have quite a few plugins in IE, but even if I disable them all (except for CIEHook) I still get the same problem. (I.e. I can’t navigate to any website with CIEHook enabled).

Thanks again,
Martin

4

I’m not sure if it makes you any more comfortable but pagetest.exe is using IE, just without the IE skin and all of the plugins IE uses. It will use whatever version of IE is currently installed on your system.

What Antivirus do you use? Just trying to see if there is a pattern with specific software because a fair number of people as seeing similar behavior (though it usually doesn’t block browsing) and I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet.