New Webpagetest user questions

[jbr]

Nice tool. Much appreciation to everyone involved.

I have looked thru the documentation and forum a bit and have a few questions …

1) Why would anyone install a private instance instead of using the central server all the time?

2) If installing a private instance, I see the test agents referenced as being installed on Windows servers. Can it just be installed a Windows 7 desktop? Does it have to be Windows Server?

3) Do you have to have a different physical agent for each web browser you want to test? Or can we put IE8, 9 etc, Chrome multi versions, Firefox, etc all on one Windows 7 desktop as the testing agent?

4) If we install a private instance, initially we would like to put the web server on a Red Hat VM and one test agent on a Windows 7 VM. Any problems with that?

Thanks

[pmeenan]

(10-29-2014 01:36 AM)jbr Wrote:  1) Why would anyone install a private instance instead of using the central server all the time?

There are a bunch of reasons:
- Test intranet or dev sites from behind a firewall
- Use the API for automated testing (beyond the very low limits that I allow on the public instance)
- Control over the infrastructure (I don't provide any SLAs and there is no guarantee of consistency from location to location since the hardware is provided by the community).

Quote:2) If installing a private instance, I see the test agents referenced as being installed on Windows servers. Can it just be installed a Windows 7 desktop? Does it have to be Windows Server?

Desktop is fine, sorry for the confusion. All of the Dulles agents are on Windows 7 Home edition for example and there is a mix including XP, Windows 8, Server 2003, Server 2008, Server 2012 and probably a few more that I'm forgetting (32 and 64-bit).

Quote:3) Do you have to have a different physical agent for each web browser you want to test? Or can we put IE8, 9 etc, Chrome multi versions, Firefox, etc all on one Windows 7 desktop as the testing agent?

Yes and No. For every different version of IE you need a different OS install (can be VM or physical machine). Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari can all co-exist on the same machine.

For Chrome you can have one version of stable and one version of canary that co-exist and for Firefox you can have as many as you'd like (though if you use the server-pushed updates you just get a rolling version of the stable release).

Quote:4) If we install a private instance, initially we would like to put the web server on a Red Hat VM and one test agent on a Windows 7 VM. Any problems with that?

Nope, that should work fine. I mostly use Ubuntu/Debian so there may be some setup idiosyncrasies that need to be worked through on Red Hat but it should "just work". I just remember someone opening a bug several years back about an issue on CentOS so just ping me if you see any issues and I'll get it fixed.