Reading the WebPageTest Log Files

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

I have a private instance setup and I noticed that there are .log files under wpt-www/logs folder.

How do I read this file i.e. What do the columns signify? I notice some data looks like dates and IP address, but there are some 0s and 2s, and I don’t quite understand what they are supposed to be.

Thanks.

2

You can find the column details here - webpagetest/runtest.php at master · WPO-Foundation/webpagetest · GitHub

Although I think I’ve got a few extra columns in my logs

3

Thanks Andy. Much appreciated.

Any idea how to tell which tests were successful, and which weren’t?

I batch tested about 1000 websites using Chrome for both Cable and 3G (Mobile) connections and I noticed that for 3G, some of the pages didn’t fully load at all before the browser closed automatically and the next test began. I restarted by system and then everything worked fine.

How do I determine what tests failed and which didn’t.

4

My guess is you could either query the API using the testid and see what the response is or test.log in relevant folder for each test might tell you.

Something like this should works out the path to test.log from the testID

[php] $path =“”;
$parts = explode(“_”, $testID);
$dateParts = str_split($parts[0], 2);
$path = “results/” . implode(“/”, $dateParts) . “/” . $parts[1] . “/” . $parts[2];[/php]

No guarantees the code is correct so you’ll need to check it.

5

Thanks a lot for this.

What piece of information in the test.log would tell me that something went wrong? I just don’t know what to look for at this point.

Also, I was actually using the API, so I have a JSON Result. What piece of information in the JSON result would indicate an error/exception?

Thanks again.

6

Your best bet would be to turn on test result logging in settings.ini. It will stream json log entries to a specified log file as each test completes.

The test log you’re looking at is just the log of test requests that were submitted and never gets updated with the result (think of it like the access log for test requests) and is used to power the test history UI.

7

Thanks Patrick. I appreciate the tip.

It’s just that I’ve already tested about 3,000 websites on two different modes so I have 6,000 JSON files, and I noticed some issues with a handful of the test when they were happening but I was unable to capture any URLs to trace it to a specific file.

Is there nothing in the actual JSON result file that could point to some errors in the operation?

8

Which JSON result file? If you use the API and get jsonResult.php there should be both the result code (0 or 99999 are success) and any error messages that the UI displays.

9

Thanks. I didn’t know what to look for at first, but I was able to find two values in the JSON file:

  1. successfulFVRuns
  2. successfulRVRuns

These have a value or 1 or 0 based on whether the test was successful or not respectively. So I parsed for this and it’s looking ok so far.

I also set ‘Time Limit=300’ in the wptdriver.ini file to give the Mobile 3G Tests enough time to finish.