1iExploder 1.3.2 2=============== 3 4Welcome to iExploder. a highly inefficient, but fairly effective web 5browser tester. The code still has a lot of work to be done, but it's 6definitely usable. Here are some notable features: 7 8* Tests all common HTML and CSS tags and attributes, as parsed from 9the KHTML, WebKit and Mozilla source trees, as well as tags for 10Internet Explorer from MSDN. This also includes a few Javascript hooks. 11* Numeric, and String overflow and formatting tests 12* Sequential and Randomized Test Case Generation 13* Test Case Lookups 14* Subtest generation 15 16 17Installation (Standalone) 18------------------------- 19Make sure you have Ruby installed (comes with Mac OS X, most Linux 20distributions). See http://www.ruby-lang.org/ if you do not. 21 22If you do not already have a webserver setup, you can use the server 23built into iexploder. Simply go into the htdocs directory and type: 24 25% ruby webserver.rb 26 27A webserver will then start on port 2000 with the iexploder form. If 28port 2000 is not preferable, you can pass it another port on the command 29line: 30 31% ruby webserver.rb 2001 32 33Please note that lasthit.rb does not currently work with the logs output 34from this method. I recommend using a seperate instance/port number 35for each browser you test simultaneous using this method. 36 37 38Installation (External Webserver) 39--------------------------------- 40If you wish to use an external webserver (required for lasthit.rb use), 41you may do so. IExploder has been tested with apache. 42 43Copy the contents of the htdocs/ folder to any directory served 44by your webserver. Make sure that directory can execute CGI scripts. If 45performance seems to be low, please try using mod_ruby. 46 47 48FAQ: 49---- 501) Are the tests always the same? 51 52 The test cases should always be the same on a single installation, but not 53necessarily on different installations of iExploder. Random generator seeds 54may differ between operating systems and platforms. If you alter the tag and 55property counts in config.rb, it will change the test cases as well. 56 57 582) How do I look up the last successful test for a client? 59 60Use tools/lasthit.rb. When I get a crash, I usually do something like: 61 62 % tail -15000 /var/log/apache2/access_log | ./lasthit.rb 63 64Letting you know how many tests and what the last test id was for each 65client tested. You can then try to repeat the test, or go through the 66subtests to see if you can repeat the crash. 67 68 693) How do subtests work? 70 71If you see a crash on a particular test, and would like to determine the exact 72line that is crashing it, you can use subtests. To do so, go back to the test 73submission form, and start the test from the number that a crash was indicated 74on. Instead of leaving the "subtest" field blank, set it to 1. This will rotate 75through each subtest for a particular test. 76 77Each subtest will rotate through a tag offset and a number of tags to 78garble, which should help you isolate the instance. The number of tags 79used doubles each cycle. Here is an idea of how many subtests to expect 80based on your $HTML_MAX_TAGS settings: 81 82tags subtests 83---------------- 8432 138 8548 236 8664 332 8796 558 88128 782 89 90Most of the time you will be able to replicate a crash within the first 91$HTML_MAX_TAGS subtests, but sometimes crashes are due to a combination 92of corrupted tags. 93 94 954) How come I can't seem to repeat the crash? 96 97 Many browser crashes are race conditions that are not easy to repeat. Some 98crashes only happen when going from test 4 -> test 5 -> test 6. If you can't 99repeat the crash through subtests or a lookup of the failing test, try going 100back a few tests. 101 102That said, some crashes are due to race conditions that are very difficult 103to replicate. 104 105 1065) Why did you write this? 107 108 I wanted to make sure that FireFox had as many bugs fixed in it as possible 109before the 1.0 release. After 1.0 came out, I kept improving it. 110 111 1126) Why does Internet Explorer run the tests so slowly? 113 114 <META> refresh tags are very fragile in Internet Explorer, and can be easily 115be rendered useless by other tags on the page. If this happens, a javascript 116refresh will execute after a 1 second delay. 117 118 119 1207) How do I change the number of tags iExploder tests per page? 121 122See config.rb. I personally recommend 32-128 HTML tags per page. While this 123seems to be a lot to go through when designing a test case, that's why the 124subtest engine was made. Different web browsers will have different 125performance characteristics when it comes to the number of tags per page. 126 127Here are the results with Firefox 2.0b1 (Bon Echo) and the iExploder 128built-in webserver running tests 1-250. 129 130tags seconds pages/second tags/second 131----------------------------------------- 13232 60 4.0 131 13348 85 2.9 141 13464 95 2.6 168 13596 120 2.1 200 *DEFAULT* 136128 140 1.8 228 137196 228 1.1 210 138256 308 0.8 207 139 140If you find pages/second to be more important than tags/second, I would 141change $HTML_MAX_TAGS to 32. Do keep in mind that large tag counts mean 142longer subtest generation periods. 143 144 1458) What other performance enhancements can I make? 146 147* Before using iExploder, reset your browser history 148* Minimize your browser while iExploder is running 149* If using Apache, make use of mod_ruby 150