I am having a weird issue with our internal WebPageTest instance.
When I go to submit a test runtest.php returns a 200 and no content to the client. The job actually does get submitted - the remote Windows host sees the job and runs what was requested (and then returns the results to the server like it should), but all the client gets back from runtest.php is a 200 and no content. When I run a test from the public servers I see runtest.php return a 302 with a redirect to the test results URL.
I’m running out of ideas here for how to troubleshoot this. I’ve had WebPageTest up and running before, but I’m trying to move it to a new host.
The host is a RHEL5.5 server with PHP 5.3.8 and Apache 2.2.21.
Is there a way to increase the logging level from none to some? Or, any ideas as to where to go from here?
There isn’t any logging inside of the runtest.php code (though there is a basic logging infrastructure in place, I just haven’t had to instrument that part of the code before).
Are you submitting directly through the UI or are you calling it from a command line? Just doing a sanity check to make sure you aren’t passing a format specifier (&f=xml or &f=json or something like that). You still shouldn’t get an empty document but that would explain a 200 response. If mod_rewrite isn’t working it might also explain it if the redirect sends them to a page that then doesn’t work.
I traced out the error to gz_file_put_contents() inside of common.inc. In here there is a call to gzopen(), which is part of the zlib module. The zlib module is not included in PHP by default, and since it wasn’t listed as a dependency I didn’t built it.
It looks like this has come up before – someone added “nogzip” to settings.ini, but it’s commented out by default. (I could have uncommented this and set it to 0 to get around this.) The line where it was actually halting is:
It’s halting because gzopen is only there if the zlib module is built and enabled. (Why it wasn’t returning an error to the console I’m not sure and didn’t take the time to dig into it.)
The “bug” here is that zlib is a dependency and isn’t listed in the docs.
I have attached a patch to this post that fixes this issue – in addition to making sure nogzip is not enabled in settings.ini it also makes sure that the zlib module is enabled before trying to use it.
The “easy” thing to do is just list zlib as a dependancy.
What I chose to do is just rebuild PHP to include zlib since there are other benefits as well, but figured I’d reply back here in case anyone else runs into this issue.
