What are good yet cheap Windows hosting plans for private WPT?

[goivvy]

Hi to all,

I need to setup a private WPT instance but have no windows machines available

could you please suggest a good yet cheap windows hosting provider suitable for private WPT?

[pmeenan]

AWS is by far the easiest (just start the pre-configured agent AMI) and if you use persistent spot instances the agent is dirt-cheap.

Then you can run the web server on linux anywhere you'd like. The original WebPageTest was run on Dreamhost for example because of the unlimited storage (but to be fair, that was ~8 years ago).

[goivvy]

okay

I launched test agent AMI ie9-20121031 (ami-d53d1b90)

user data string: wpt_server=wpt.goivvy.com wpt_location=EC2-WPT

then I setup master server at http://wpt.goivvy.com

here is my locations.ini:

[locations]
1=EC2
default=EC2

[EC2]
1=EC2-WPT_wptdriver
2=EC2-WPT
label="US East (Virginia)"
default=EC2-WPT_wptdriver

[EC2-WPT_wptdriver]
browser=Chrome,Firefox
label="US East (Virginia)"

[EC2-WPT]
browser=IE 9
label="US East (Virginia) IE"

but when I go to http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.php I don't see anything

does test agent need to connect to the master and register?

i am lost please help

[pmeenan]

You can see hidden locations with ?hidden=1 query param: http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.php?hidden=1

Your locations.ini definition looks good. And yes, for the location to unhide, the agent needs to connect. The user data string looks good assuming a key wasn't included in the location ID. It could take up to 20 minutes for a new instance to actually start connecting to the server but if you left it running it should certainly already have connected.

Do you see requests for /getwork.php in the access log on the server? That would be the agent connecting to poll for work.

[goivvy]

no I don't see /getwork.php requests

the only requests related to wpt are:

72.66.115.14 - - [18/Nov/2016:19:33:07 +0300] "GET http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.php?hidden=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 452 "http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.php?hidden=1" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36"
72.66.115.14 - - [18/Nov/2016:19:33:07 +0300] "GET http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.xsl HTTP/1.1" 200 590 "http://wpt.goivvy.com/getLocations.php?hidden=1" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36"

[pmeenan]

You may need to rdp into the test agent to see if anything is obviously broken there (though there shouldn't be anything breakable). Administrator pw is "2dialit"

[goivvy]

did so

it says software install failed waiting to try again (wptdriver)

see the screenshot http://prnt.sc/d8xgf6

---

my aws instance details http://prnt.sc/d8xh20

[pmeenan]

I wonder if Chrome no longer supports whatever version of Windows the IE9 AMI's use.

Do you need IE9 testing specifically? Otherwise using the IE 11 may be a better choice.

That said, the urlblaster side of things should still poll for work so I'm not sure why that isn't showing up.

[goivvy]

i terminated ec2 instance and created a new one (IE11/Chrome/Firefox/Safari (2016, wptdriver only) - ami-678afe07)

now i see:

54.215.213.65 - - [18/Nov/2016:21:07:17 +0300] "GET http://wpt.goivvy.com/work/getwork.php?s....723&GPU=0 HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "WebPagetest Driver"

but still nothing in test locations dropdown

---

sorry all good

i restarted varnish and now test location dropdown is filled with the correct test agent

thank you

is it only me or ami-d53d1b90 is better be removed from https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.o...-instances guide

[pmeenan]

Going in now and removing the IE9 (and possibly IE10) ami's :-(