NUnit maximum timeout value - timeout

I have some tests that are very slow and I want to set as timeout 15 minutes.
As test purpose I have this example:
[Test, Timeout(900000)]
public void Test1()
{
Thread.Sleep(900001);
}
The test after some time stops without errors.
What's the correct way to do it?

As you know, both Thread.Sleep and NUnit's TimeoutAttribute take time in milliseconds. Specifying times that are 1 millisecond off from each other isn't enough to guarantee a timeout due to thread scheduling and general timer accuracy. See this answer for a little more discussion about the accuracy of Thread.Sleep, and by extension NUnit's timeout thread's accuracy.
Try specifying a larger difference between the two numbers and I suspect you'll see it behaves as you'd expect. For instance, sleep for 900100 milliseconds and leave the timeout value as is. With a timeout of 15 minutes, you won't notice an extra tenth of a second waiting for it to timeout.

Related

Understand how k6 manages at low level a large number of API call in a short period of time

I'm new with k6 and I'm sorry if I'm asking something naive. I'm trying to understand how that tool manage the network calls under the hood. Is it executing them at the max rate he can ? Is it queuing them based on the System Under Test's response time ?
I need to get that because I'm running a lot of tests using both k6 run and k6 cloud but I can't make more than ~2000 requests per second (looking at k6 results). I was wondering if it is k6 that implement some kind of back-pressure mechanism if it understand that my system is "slow" or if there are some other reasons why I can't overcome that limit.
I read here that is possible to make 300.000 request per second and that the cloud environment is already configured for that. I also try to manually configure my machine but nothing changed.
e.g. The following tests are identical, the only changes is the number of VUs. I run all test on k6 cloud.
Shared parameters:
60 api calls (I have a single http.batch with 60 api calls)
Iterations: 100
Executor: per-vu-iterations
Here I got 547 reqs/s:
VUs: 10 (60.000 calls with an avg response time of 108ms)
Here I got 1.051,67 reqs/s:
VUs: 20 (120.000 calls with an avg response time of 112 ms)
I got 1.794,33 reqs/s:
VUs: 40 (240.000 calls with an avg response time of 134 ms)
Here I got 2.060,33 ​reqs/s:
VUs: 80 (480.000 calls with an avg response time of 238 ms)
Here I got 2.223,33 ​reqs/s:
VUs: 160 (960.000 calls with an avg response time of 479 ms)
Here I got 2.102,83 peak ​reqs/s:
VUs: 200 (1.081.380 calls with an avg response time of 637 ms) // I reach the max duration here, that's why he stop
What I was expecting is that if my system can't handle so much requests I have to see a lot of timeout errors but I haven't see any. What I'm seeing is that all the API calls are executed and no errors is returned. Can anyone help me ?
As k6 - or more specifically, your VUs - execute code synchronously, the amount of throughput you can achieve is fully dependent on how quickly the system you're interacting with responds.
Lets take this script as an example:
import http from 'k6/http';
export default function() {
http.get("https://httpbin.org/delay/1");
}
The endpoint here is purposefully designed to take 1 second to respond. There is no other code in the exported default function. Because each VU will wait for a response (or a timeout) before proceeding past the http.get statement, the maximum amount of throughput for each VU will be a very predictable 1 HTTP request/sec.
Often, response times (and/or errors, like timeouts) will increase as you increase the number of VUs. You will eventually reach a point where adding VUs does not result in higher throughput. In this situation, you've basically established the maximum throughput the System-Under-Test can handle. It simply can't keep up.
The only situation where that might not be the case is when the system running k6 runs out of hardware resources (usually CPU time). This is something that you must always pay attention to.
If you are using k6 OSS, you can scale to as many VUs (concurrent threads) as your system can handle. You could also use http.batch to fire off multiple requests concurrently within each VU (the statement will still block until all responses have been received). This might be slightly less overhead than spinning up additional VUs.

How much computing time does the kernel need

I wrote a program for a LED display. The program allows to set the refresh rate via webconfiguration. To meet the refresh rate I measure the processing time of a loop. At the end I calculate the delay and wait until the next loop.
e.g. Refresh Rate 5 Hz -> 200 milli seconds for one loop. 50 milli seconds computing time results in 150 milli seconds delay.
The ratio of process time (50 milli seconds) to total time (200 milli seconds) indicates the processor load of my program. But to find the optimal setting, I need the actual total processor load. And not only that of my program. But since I don't know the real processor load of the delay() (in which WIFI etc. is done), I don't really know the processor load. In other words, I don't know how much time the system spends doing system tasks in the delay(150).
Is there a way to find out how much of a delay is actually used for system tasks before the processor truly waits?
In other words, I'm looking for a way to get the kernel time within a certain time frame.
Cheers Gabriel

objective-c - NSTimer falling more and more behind

I have a NSTimer (running on main thread) that is supposed to go off every 0.02s. However, I notice that as memory usage start going up (the app captures a frame every tick and stores in an array) subsequent ticks begin to take more then 0.02s.
How can I solve this issue? I'm starting to think NSTimer is not suited for high-frequency tasks like this.
As the docs state,
A timer is not a real-time mechanism; it fires only when one of the
run loop modes to which the timer has been added is running and able
to check if the timer’s firing time has passed. Because of the various
input sources a typical run loop manages, the effective resolution of
the time interval for a timer is limited to on the order of 50-100
milliseconds.
Since 100 milliseconds = .1 seconds and your timer is supposed to run every 0.02 seconds, your timer schedule is far shorter than the timer's effective resolution and so you timer can easily get out of sync.

How to make a thread sleep/block for nanoseconds

How can I block a thread for nanoseconds or microseconds? The Sleep() function is not possible because it accepts miliseconds which is obviously not what I need.
Use the TStopWatch class, and write a while loop that spins until the desired number of ticks (100 nanosecond intervals) has elapsed.
property ElapsedTicks : Int64 read GetElapsedTicks;
This will not relinquish control to other threads; it will simply wait in the current thread for the desired period of time. There will be some degree of error; the amount of error will depend on how long it takes Delphi to execute each loop.
Further Reading
How to Accurately Measure Elapsed Time Using High-Resolution Performance Counter
Windows does not support nano sleep. The thread scheduling used by Windows is much coarser than that. The Windows thread quantum is orders of magnitude longer than a nano-second.

Why does epoll_wait only provide huge 1ms timeout?

epoll_wait, select and poll functions all provide a timeout. However with epoll, it's at a large resolution of 1ms. Select & ppoll are the only one providing sub-millisecond timeout.
That would mean doing other things at 1ms intervals at best. I could do a lot of other things within 1ms on a modern CPU.
So to do other things more often than 1ms I actually have to provide a timeout of zero (essentially disabling it). And I'd probably add my own usleep somewhere in the main loop to stop it chewing up too much CPU.
So the question is, why is the timeout in milli's when I would think clearly there is a case for a higher resolution timeout.
Since you are on Linux, instead of providing a zero timeout value and manually usleeeping in the loop body, you could simply use the timerfd API. This essentially lets you create a timer (with a resolution finer than 1ms) associated with a file descriptor, which you can add to the set of monitored descriptors.
The epoll_wait interface just inherited a timeout measured in milliseconds from poll. While it doesn't make sense to poll for less than a millisecond, because of the overhead of adding the calling thread to all the wait sets, it does make sense for epoll_wait. A call to epoll_wait doesn't require ever putting the calling thread onto more than one wait set, the calling overhead is very low, and it could make sense, on very rare occasions, to block for less than a millisecond.
I'd recommend just using a timing thread. Most of what you would want to do can just be done in that timing thread, so you won't need to break out of epoll_wait. If you do need to make a thread return from epoll_wait, just send a byte to a pipe that thread is polling and the wait will terminate.
In Linux 5.11, an epoll_pwait2 API has been added, which uses a struct timespec as timeout. This means you can now wait using nanoseconds precision.

Resources