very long doc ready-times with HTTPS-teststep

Support
1

Hi Patrick,

we are setting up some new agents at the moment. Cause of some trouble with virtualized agents and time synchronization we mainly use physical agents. But we want to give it a try with vmware this time.

We observe strange results with a test which measures the last step of a sequence. With this last step the communication switches to HTTPS.
Script:

[code]
logData 0
/// product 1 in basket
navigate http://www.otto.de/suche/?commit=true&ls=0&commit=true&fh_search=shirt&&fh_search_requested=shirt&sterm=shirt&stype=N
execAndWait document.querySelector(‘#p0 a.js_ProductListProductRef’).click();
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgAddToBasket’).click();

/// product 2 in basket
navigate http://www.otto.de/suche/?commit=true&ls=0&commit=true&fh_search=brille&&fh_search_requested=brille&sterm=brille&stype=N&SelectRuleEngineVariants=0
execAndWait document.querySelector(‘#p0 a.js_ProductListProductRef’).click();
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgAddToBasket’).click();

/// product 3 in basket
navigate http://www.otto.de/suche/?commit=true&ls=0&commit=true&fh_search=bikini&&fh_search_requested=bikini&sterm=bikini&stype=N&SelectRuleEngineVariants=0
execAndWait document.querySelector(‘#p0 a.js_ProductListProductRef’).click();
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgAddToBasket’).click();

/// product 4 in basket
navigate http://www.otto.de/suche/?commit=true&ls=0&commit=true&fh_search=adidas&&fh_search_requested=adidas&sterm=adidas&stype=N&SelectRuleEngineVariants=0
execAndWait document.querySelector(‘#p0 a.js_ProductListProductRef’).click();
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgAddToBasket’).click();

/// product 5 in basket
navigate http://www.otto.de/suche/?commit=true&ls=0&commit=true&fh_search=nike&&fh_search_requested=nike&sterm=nike&stype=N&SelectRuleEngineVariants=0
execAndWait document.querySelector(‘#p0 a.js_ProductListProductRef’).click();
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgAddToBasket’).click();

logData 1
execAndWait document.getElementById(‘TconImgGotoBasket’).click();[/code]

Strange about this is that we run this script on 6 different vmware-agents and some deliver correct results with about 3-4 secs doc ready-time (with 6 mbit/s down and 512 kbit/s upload-bw). But some deliver a constant doc ready time of about 74 (!) secs. You can watch this behaviour on respective agent and the rendering of the measured page feels like 54k-modem or something. While the previous steps (HTTP) render with the nomal speed. The problem is that ttfb and download time is very long for some static content (mainly images):
[attachment=308]
The agents switch bahaviour between loading normal and strange with daily reboot (and even without reboot from time to time), but unfortunately we don’t know why and due to what…

Strange behaviour just with IE (we run version 8). If we load same page of same sequence in IE8 on the agent, manually, everything seems OK.

Same script never showed as long doc ready-times on physical agents.

Ever observed something similar, any ideas?

Regards, Nils

2

Which version of VMWare? What kind of disk and how is performance on the server itself? I usually have them configured so that each VM gets it’s own core, memory isn’t over-subscribed and the disks are on SSD just to make sure there aren’t resource contentions.

3

Hi,

VM’s:
OS: Win 7 32-bit
CPU: 2 vCPU
RAM: 4096 MB
VM-Version: 8

Server:
Version:
VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor
Image Profile: ESXI-5.1.0-20130402001
disk: non-SSD / SATA
ESXi Host has enough power; RAM and CPU are not over-committed, so our hoster.

Regards, Nils

4

You can try the time/clock settings if you didn’t apply them to your VM: https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/private-instances#TOC-General-Machine-Configuration-common-for-all-browsers- but from the sounds of it you are really seeing it run that slow. I haven’t seen that happen before.