Patrick Meenan gives an update on his Dulles, VA “data center” for webpagetest.org:
As far as scaling the servers goes, I load up more VM’s than I expect to use, submit a whole lot of tests with all of the options enabled and watch the hypervisor’s utilization. I shut down VM’s until the CPU utilization stays below 80% (one per CPU thread seems to be the sweet spot).
Moving up the rack we have the unraid NAS where the tests are archived for long-term storage (as of this post the array can hold 49TB of data with 18TB used for test results). I have a bunch of other things on the array so not all of that 30TB is free but I expect to be able to continue storing results indefinitely for the foreseeable future.
A big thank you to Patrick for all the work he has put into webpagetest.org. I’m particularly impressed with the effort being put into doing tests with real mobile devices.