Frequently Asked Questions

1. WebPageTest is open source. Can the performance budget module use a private WebPageTest instance instead of the public instance?

Yes, and as of June 2020, this is actually the recommended way to do it, as webpagetest.org is no longer issuing public API keys.

2. Does performance budget module only monitor Drupal-based websites?

No. It can monitor any publicly-accessible website (although please adhere to the robots.txt policy for any site you don't own)

3. Can performance budget monitor Intranet links, staging environments, etc...?

WebPageTest can monitor anything it has access to that doesn't require extra authentication. For this to work, you would need to ensure the WebPageTest instance you are using is in a trusted IP address list to access those resources.

4. Can I install performance budget on the same server as my Drupal website?

Yes, but it's not recommended for a variety of reasons. First of all, both performance budget and the parent module (web page archive), can potentially use a heavy amount of system resources. These are resources that you would take away from the rest of your site.

Additionally, since performance budget is still a beta module (as of July 15, 2020), there are some security risks involved on installing on your production site as it's not covered by the Drupal Security Advisory.

Also, we recommend that cron run against your Web Page Archive instance every minute, so that crontab-based scheduling works as expected. This frequency may be overkill, and even problematic for production servers with a lot of other things installed.

5. Will this work for a decoupled site?

This module can basically support anything WebPageTest can support. And decoupled sites, area really just flat HTML sites that make additional javascript connections to load in the necessary resources, so it would be handled just fine. You might just need to look into other front-end focused metrics. 

6. Is this module accessible? 

No, but we want it to be. There are especially some issues in regard to the built-in charting behavior. If this is your area of expertise, we could use your help over on this Drupal.org issue. 

7. Is there an "average gant chart" for multiple requests.

No, not really. There is an aggregate request summary though, that shows all hosts connected to over a period of time of your historical report, and sorts them by load time (in descending order), so that you can see what hosts are most negatively impacting your load time.

8. This module supports sending alerts via email. Are slack notifications built into the module?

Not directly. You can configure slack, to be able to send email directly into a channel. If this isn't enough for your particular use case, the base web page archive module uses generic "Notification Plugins". If someone wants to build a wrapper around the Slack module, we'd be willing to get that functionality merged into the module. :-)