WebPageTest 2.16

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

WebPagetest 2.16 is now available.

The biggest changes:

  • Added support for an easy-deploy server running on EC2.
  • Mobile agent now (correctly) closes the browser between first and repeat view to match the desktop behavior.
  • Moved to server-side video rendering.
  • StatsD integration.
2

This looks very promising, thank you… I love how easy it will be to get high levels of concurrency with this approach!

I have a few questions about the configuration. I’m attempting to set up the showslow integration but the tests don’t seem to be publishing data.

I am running ShowSlow here:

http://{myIp}/showslow/

My WPT configuration is:

ec2_key={...}
ec2_secret={...}
api_key={...}
shard_tests=1
maxruns=100
pngss=1
agentUpdate=http://cdn.webpagetest.org/
showslow=http://{myIp}/showslow/
beaconRate=100
showslow_key={...}
EC2.ScaleFactor=25
EC2.us-east-1.min=0
EC2.us-east-1.max=1

However, the WPT server does not ‘see’ the configuration for showslow and does not send the test results to my showslow server. I wanted to check the logs but none of them (that I can find) have relevant information. From debugging the code, it looks like calls to GetSetting() are not returning all the information passed in the user data.

test.php

<?php
require_once('/var/www/webpagetest/www/common_lib.inc');

foreach ($argv as $arg) {
   echo $arg . ":\t" . GetSetting($arg) . "\n";
}
?>

output:

ubuntu@ip-10-150-41-44:~$ php test.php ec2_key shard_tests maxruns pngss agentUpdate showslow beaconRate showslow_key EC2.ScaleFactor EC2.us-east-1.min EC2.us-east-1.max
test.php:	
ec2_key:	XXXXXX
shard_tests:	1
maxruns:	50
pngss:	
agentUpdate:	http://cdn.webpagetest.org/
showslow:	
beaconRate:	
showslow_key:	
EC2.ScaleFactor:	
EC2.us-east-1.min:	
EC2.us-east-1.max:

Do you have any suggestions for troubleshooting configuration problems with the server or what I have done wrong?

A more general question/observation. The blog post indicates that we can copy the AMI but that wasn’t possible for me until I created a new AMI from a running instance - I didn’t dig into this too much, but would like to sort it out because I would like WPT and all instances to run in VPCs. Can I configure VPC settings for the instances that are created, or would I solve this issue by creating a user that can only launch into VPCs?

3

Looks like my issues are due to the settings.ini NOT updating when new user data is passed into the instance (and it is restarted). Once the settings.ini is created it persists the params you initially configured it with and not the current user data (has the benefit of not leaving your EC2 access info in the user data field of the instance).

To update the settings.ini you can just ssh to the box and manually update it:

sudo vim /var/www/webpagetest/www/settings/settings.ini
4

[quote=“pherris, post:3, topic:9153”]
Looks like my issues are due to the settings.ini NOT updating when new user data is passed into the instance (and it is restarted).[/quote]

I’m having the same problem - updated the EC2 scaling factors in the user data, and re-started the instance, but there is no change in the scaling behaviour. Manually updating settings.ini, and it now works as expected.
I’ve raised an issue here: EC2 private instance: Updating user data has no affect on a re-started instance · Issue #379 · WPO-Foundation/webpagetest · GitHub

5

The docs were updated around a week ago to make it clear that the user data just populates the settings at the time of the initial launch. Any changes after that would need to be done to the settings.ini on the server.