I am running hosted version (both apache and test client) on one windows xp laptop that has IE8. When I submit a test via the hosted website, IE8 fires up but the proxy settings are not enabled in the browser. This is a problem as some URL’s on the web page I am testing need to go via a proxy.
To prove this I viewed the proxy settings in the browser when it was fired up by urlblast. I could see the proxy server entry but the check box to enable it was not ticked. (I had to be quick as the browser window didn’t appear for long before it shut down). The screenshot taken by urlblast during the test is attached.
Note: When I fire up IE8 manually, the proxy settings are enabled.
It doesn’t currently support doing proxied testing and I strongly recommend against doing any performance testing through a proxy unless you’re actually trying to test the proxy itself. The browsers all perform very differently through a proxy (only opening up 2-6 connections to the proxy instead of 2-6 connections to each different domain).
That said, if you really do want to test a proxy, let me know and I can add support for it. Most of the code is already done because we do actually use it to test the AOL client proxy software.
Is the proxy support available now? I am running it on a box which is beind a proxy. Fires the browsers up but the tests dont run a the browser load without the proxy settings.
Nope. I still strongly discourage using a proxy because the performance will not be representative of real users (unless your users are all behind proxies).
I’d also like to see this feature as well. We use internal proxies to proxy requests to our specific DEV/Build/QA environments. That way we use the same URLs we would in production.
Build 260 of URLBlast should fix it but it hasn’t been released with a bundle yet. You can either get it from svn or pick up the latest from here: http://www.webpagetest.org/work/update/update.zip (currently at 265)
That said, testing for performance through a proxy is just about worthless because the browser behaves VERY differently. Optimization checks are fine but that’s about it. You’re much better off using the DNS override capabilities to redirect requests to the appropriate environment: http://www.webperformancecentral.com/wiki/WebPagetest/Scripting#setDns
That’s a fair comment, but for what I am doing it will suffice at the moment. Can I make it use a proxy when firing the tests?