CrossBrowserTesting adds a pool for summer - dive in!

What is summer time without a pool? We have been busy the last few months adding a pool at CrossBrowserTesting. Not a swimming pool... but a pool of prewarmed, ready to go live testing configurations. What does this do for you? It reduces the wait time when requesting a Windows XP, Vista, or Win 7 configuration from around 60 seconds to less than 30 seconds. It is a huge time saver!

So what did we do exactly? First, a little background. All of our configurations are launched from locked down, suspended, disk images. Depending on the operating system, it would take from 45 to 60 seconds from the time you requested a configuration to the time you could actually see the browsers on its desktop and be able to start your testing. With this change, we are now prelaunching our most popular configurations and they are sitting, just waiting for your request. They will now load in 15-30 seconds, enabling you to start your testing that much quicker.

Several things had to happen to enable this. First, we added a ton of new capacity earlier in this year. This additional capacity has given us the headroom to dedicate space for these waiting configurations. Second, there was a significant amount of backroom plumbing that had to take place to enable this functionality. After doing our testing this weekend, however, we have declared it very much worth the work! Waiting is painful... and it is much nicer to be able to select a config and have it appear just seconds later.

One note for our customers that have had to setup firewall rules to allow vnc connections to CrossBrowserTesting via ports 6020-6040. As part of this change, we had to increase the range of ports we connect through to 6020-6100. We went ahead and increased it enough so we should not have to change this for a long, long time. You will need to update your firewall to accept the full range or you will experience problems with the live testing. You can read more about the firewall rules at http://crossbrowsertesting.com/faq/i-cant-get-connected-behind-my-firewa....

We have worked hard on this change, and believe it will significantly increase your productivity while doing your Q/A work on your web sites. Dive in, and happy testing!

Ken, Mike, and Tony