WebPageTest

***pmeenan*** · 10-20-2010, 08:58 PM

I know several users are running instances of the hosted version in EC2 and figured it would be a good idea for everyone to compare notes (and even AMI's, etc). With any luck we could eventually get to a push-button deployment of private monitoring/WebPagetest in the cloud.

**asperkins** · (This post was last modified: 10-21-2010 04:33 AM by asperkins.)

(10-20-2010 08:58 PM)pmeenan Wrote: I know several users are running instances of the hosted version in EC2 and figured it would be a good idea for everyone to compare notes (and even AMI's, etc). With any luck we could eventually get to a push-button deployment of private monitoring/WebPagetest in the cloud.

I've been running my WPT instance plus WPT Monitor for a couple months now on EC2. Originally I set it up on a fedora AMI, but have recently fired one up on CentOS as a micro instance. The CentOS micro instance seems to perform very well.

Here are the details of what I did. I believe most of these are required for the Monitor. I think WPT is less demanding.

I use RightScale to manage my EC2 resources.

I also have win2003 wpt agents in all EC2 regions.

If you try the following please provide feedback and I'll tweak where needed.

Once we have this pinned down I will be able to create and share a pre configured AMI.

Micro instance
AMI: ami-2342a94a - RightImage_CentOS_5.4_i386_v5.5.9_EBS

yum install httpd
yum install php
yum install php-pear
yum install php-devel
yum install gcc
yum install zlib-devel
yum install curl-devel
pecl install pecl_http
yum install php-gd
yum install php-pdo
yum install subversion
echo "extension=http.so" > /etc/php.d/http.ini

cd
mkdir src
cd src
svn co http://code.webpagetest.org/svn/webpagetest/ webpagetest
svn co http://code.webpagetest.org/svn/wptmonitor/trunk/ wptmonitor

cp -R webpagetest/. /var/www/html/.
cp -R wptmonitor /var/www/html

// Edit settings
vi /var/www/html/settings/locations.ini
...

/etc/init.d/httpd start

***pmeenan*** · (This post was last modified: 10-21-2010 04:06 AM by pmeenan.)

(10-21-2010 03:49 AM)asperkins Wrote: I also have win2003 wpt agents in all EC2 regions.

What instance size are you using for your agents? The micro instances would be great if they were more specific about the CPU capabilities but I get the feeling that "short periodic bursts" are not sufficient for running IE and getting stable results but I'd love it if it does work well.

**asperkins** · (This post was last modified: 10-21-2010 04:24 AM by asperkins.)

(10-21-2010 04:06 AM)pmeenan Wrote:
(10-21-2010 03:49 AM)asperkins Wrote: I also have win2003 wpt agents in all EC2 regions.

What instance size are you using for your agents? The micro instances would be great if they were more specific about the CPU capabilities but I get the feeling that "short periodic bursts" are not sufficient for running IE and getting stable results but I'd love it if it does work well.

All my agents are win2003 spot micro instances. I only run 1 thread per instance and seem to be getting good results. With the spot instances my average cost per agent is about $15/month.

I haven't verified the consistency of the results on micro instances yet. But they do seem to be sufficient for monitoring trends.

Attached is a waterfall from one of the micro instances compared to the same page pulled from webpagetest dulles instance. Notice the CPU utilization.

It would be nice to further confirm the numbers being produced by the micro instances.

The first image is from EC2 Micro Instance of windows 2003
The second image is from Dulles

***pmeenan*** · 10-28-2010, 04:50 AM

btw, just to follow up in the thread, turns out Micro instances are not good for using for performance testing: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/...age-tests/

Small instances do look like they work well though. I am working on some public EC2 AMI's that can be used for WebPagetest testers and configured through the instance user data so we should have sharable images for anyone to use soon. Just a few steps away from having a push-button monitoring system running in the cloud :-)

aaronpeters · 10-29-2010, 12:13 AM

hi Pat,

does this mean that sometime soon I can easily install my own hosted instance of WPT, e.g. a private IE8 test node, and use WPT Monitor on my own server to do the monitoring?

I know little of EC2 .... but how can I know for sure that IE8 test node will be in the Netherlands? Isn't EC2 a global cloud ... please educate me.

**asperkins** · 10-29-2010, 12:23 AM

When you fire up an instance on amazon ec2 you specify the region. They currently have 4 regions.

us-west : California
us-east : Virginia
Asia Pacific: Singapore
eu-west : Ireland

Running a small spot instance of the wpt agent costs about $50/month. If you don't need bandwidth shaping you can run 2 threads on the box with minimal impact.

aaronpeters · (This post was last modified: 10-29-2010 12:49 AM by aaronpeters.)

(10-29-2010 12:23 AM)asperkins Wrote: When you fire up an instance on amazon ec2 you specify the region. They currently have 4 regions.

us-west : California
us-east : Virginia
Asia Pacific: Singapore
eu-west : Ireland

Running a small spot instance of the wpt agent costs about $50/month. If you don't need bandwidth shaping you can run 2 threads on the box with minimal impact.

Ah, so no way to have the tests run from Amsterdam, NL.
That is a showstopper for me.

Txs Tony.

The current Amsterdam IE7 test node is a normal WinXP consumer PC.
If I have an Apache server in NL and want to use that to setup the IE8 test node, how do I do that?

Use some kind of VM ware-ish software?
And, is that as good as a standalone consumer PC machine?

**asperkins** · 10-29-2010, 12:50 AM

Right. You would need to set up your own wpt agent in Amsterdam. I'm hoping amazon will expand their coverage.

aaronpeters · 10-29-2010, 12:53 AM

Is it possible to have my LAMP server become the IE8 node?
That would mean running Windows on Linux???