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This page provides caveats for MS Windows users. Look elsewhere for help with selecting the right release for your task.

1. For the impatient
2. Caveats
3. Other options

1. For the impatient

MS Windows binaries are no longer built or supported. Prebuilt binaries for Windows 2000 platform are available for some old Polygraph versions. The Windows port has worked for some, but has no GUI and may not support high loads or advanced features. Other options are available.

2. Caveats

If you are going to use Web Polygraph on MS Windows platform, please read the following caveats first.

• Windows binaries are no longer built or supported. Prebuilt binaries for Windows 2000 platform are available for some old Polygraph versions.
• Binaries are wrapped in an Install Shield package that automates installation.
• Users have reported success using W2K binaries for production tests.
• We are unable to provide much support for Windows platforms simply because we do not know Windows well enough. Our exposure to Windows is limited to building W2K binaries and starting basic tests.
• All Web Polygraph distributions, including MS Windows port, use the same code base. If the binaries do not run on your Windows flavor, you may be able to build Polygraph from the source code. You will need a compiler (we use MS Visual C++ to build binaries) or you can do it in a cygwin environment (others reported success).
• W2K binaries provide the same command-line interface with PGL configuration files as do Unix ports. There is no special GUI for Windows. If you cannot use command-line interfaces, selecting W2K port will not help you. See below if this is a problem.
• W2K binaries will probably not work well under high loads. You may need to increase the number of filedescriptors a lot and rebuild Polygraph from scratch to get higher request rates. Polygraph assumes more-or-less continuous filedescriptor space, while Windows may allocate filedescriptors "out of order", especially at high loads.
• Some OS-dependent advanced features may be disabled or, worse, may not work correctly.
• Some standard workloads, such as PolyMix, include packet-level WAN simulation requirements. While network simulation tools probably exist for MS Windows, we are not familiar with them. If you do not have such a tool, you cannot run 100% standard tests.
• Automated report generation requires Perl and gnuplot packages that are available for MS Windows, but may need to be installed separately, which may not be trivial.

3. Other options

If you do not want to use old prebuilt Windows binaries, you have other options, including the following:

• It may be possible to build Polygraph on Windows from the source code. You will need a compiler (we used MS Visual C++ to build the provided binaries) or you can do it in a cygwin environment (others reported success).
• Use Unix instead of MS Windows. Linux (the current development platform) and FreeBSD (the former development platform) appear to be the most popular OSes for Polygraph testing. Users have also reported success with Mac OS and some other Unices.
• Sponsor the maintenance and development of missing or broken features on MS Windows platforms.

If you have better ideas, let us know.

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