We have a TFS2010 instance that is hosted overseas. We have a proxy locally so pulling source code is really no problem. Even full gets are quite speedy. One issue that we are experiencing is that when an automated build completes it takes forever for the test results to be published back to the server. The entire build and test process takes about 5 minutes. The publishing of the test results takes an additional 10 minutes. Twice the time it took to get the source, build it, and run all 1500 unit tests!
Is there any way I can speed this up?
Try setting up a build agent at your location and set a name filter in the build definition to always select that build agent.
Related
I setup my jmeter to run on jenkins daily. Everything works fine except the past jenkins build automatically flip to fail status the next day when a new schedule run kicks in and it also removed the past build results. I attached a screenshot of the build history. For sep 12, they were all green.
Anyone experience this issue or know which area I can look into?
My goal is to try to compare with past build result and send an email if the performance didn't pass criteria.
I am happy to share more details.
Unfortunately we're not telepathic enough to guess the reason by looking at a single screenshot.
Double check your job configuration, especially location of the JMeter's jtl result files as it might be the case you're storing them in current job folder instead of workspace
Double check your Performance Plugin configuration, especially "thresholds" section
Inspect Console Output for the previous/latest builds
Check jenkins.log file for any suspicious entries
We have a TFS 2017 build agent executing a Visual Studio Test task to execute our unit tests. This has worked fine for several years, but all of a sudden - without any code changes - the task gets stuck.
All the tests have finished running, we see summary information, and it will sit at what appears to be the place where it would normally publish the results... but then nothing happens. We've waited 12+ hours for it to finish. This step normally takes about 90 minutes.
I've confirmed that the TRX file is being created. It's about 4MB in size. We're running a bit over 3000 unit tests.
I've also tried disabling code coverage and attachments upload inside the test task, but it doesn't appear to make a difference.
Below is a screen cap of the log output when the step is stuck.
Lastly, we have lots of other projects on this server whose tests run / publish fine, as well as TFS Releases for this same build that also run tests (integration/system tests) which work without issue.
UPDATE: We ran this build on a different build server, and it published tests correctly. So this means there is something wrong with this specific build server...
UPDATE 2: So I'm not longer sure what is happening here. The original build server we were having issues on is now working fine with no changes whatsoever. Just started working again. The other build server was working, and then stopped. Same issue. I broke up the 3000+ tests into two steps, roughly 50/50, and that worked a couple of times, but now does not. So this does not appear to be server specific, nor does it appear to be related to the quantity of tests. Debug logging offers nothing useful, as everything seems fine right up until it just stops doing anything after generating the TRX file.
UPDATE 3: Well, it's happening again. I'm not sure how to proceed. I even tried Fiddler on the build box to see if I could catch funky looking traffic, but most of the traffic I'd expect to see I don't. It's like a good chunk of the work isn't being captured (such as source downloads, reporting progress, or test result publishing) by Fiddler. Is it not over HTTP/HTTPS?
This was difficult to figure out due to the quantity of tests we're running, but I was able to narrow it down to a test that launched ping.exe:
[ExpectedException(typeof(TimeoutException))]
[TestMethod]
public void ProcessWillTimeout()
{
const string command = "cmd";
const string args = "/C ping 127.0.0.1 /t";
var externalProcessService = new ExternalProcessService();
externalProcessService.Execute(command, args, TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(500));
}
For whatever reason, this test was leaving both conhost.exe and ping.exe "orphaned". The fact these processes were not terminating was, for an unknown reason, preventing the tests from publishing their results back to TFS. There is probably something somewhere that waits for the a process to finish and that was never happening.
Indeed, we would see a bunch of conhost.exe and ping.exe processes in both Task Manager and Process Explorer:
You'll notice the tool tip there... "[Error opening process]". I couldn't even use Process Explorer to kill these processes - although Task Manager could. Sure enough, when I killed them, the TFS build task would immediately resume and finish publishing results.
So there is clearly some kind of bug in that ExternalProcessService code we were testing (despite carefully having a finally block that terminated the process), but we are at least able to have our build tests run again without issue.
Suggest you abandon this build and trigger it again. To narrow down if this issue could be reproduced stably.
According to your description, all other builds work properly. And it worked fine for several years. All tests pass, the test report is written, but just the task hangs. Please double check if some other processes might possibly not be properly closing down.
Besides use another build agent to test again. Also try to create a newly build definition with the same settings, trigger that definition, this may do the trick.
Moreover, you could enable verbose logging for trouble shooting. To do this simply adding a build variable named system.debug and setting its value to 'true', this will contain a more detail log info.
We have a set of approximately 1000 (currently) tests, written in C#, that run twice a week. We are using TFS 2017 update 1 (on-premise), and the system is configured to run tests on 6 VMs that are set up on another machine. 4 of those VMs are running Windows Server 2012R2, and the other 2 are Windows Server 2016. All are fully up-to-date with updates. Development is done using VS 2017. All tests are straight, non-UI functional tests that use instances of SQL server on each machine, with no cross-machine communication or anything like that during tests. Each machine is its own self-contained environment.
All the tests run fine locally (or if they fail we know why and that's fine). When we launch a build, the actual build and other preliminary steps seem to go fine. When it gets to the "Run Functional Tests" step, though, only SOME of the agent machines begin running them, typically 2 of the 6, sometimes 3, and not usually the same ones. Looking at Task Manager I can see that the other VMs have no processor activity to speak of. I have no idea why this should be, or why it seems to be different machines that successfully fire up and begin running tests from run to run.
The kicker is that because all machines are not running, this puts us over the 6 hour limit test run limit, which I have seen dealt with in other threads....I have tried everything suggested in those threads (including the setting in the .runsettings file) and can't get it to let go of that timeout, and so our whole run cancels after 6 hours with a lot of the tests aborted. For some reason last week we got a clean run of all the tests...nothing had changed since the prior run, and it reverted to this behavior with the next run.
Any insight on either the "lazy" machines not running tests OR removing the 6 hour timeout would be much appreciated...
Additional note: this behavior started "out of the blue", on or about August 9. Until then, all machines performed as desired. No software upgrades or anything else suspect happened anywhere near that time. Though the 6-hour time limit thing has been bugging me for a year or so.
There is an Execution Options called Distribute tests by number of machines.
Instead of distributing tests at the assembly level, enabling this
setting will distribute tests based on the number of machines
irrespective of the container assemblies given to the task.
Source Link
Note: that tests within a dll might also be distributed to multiple machines.
To bypass the 6 hours limitation, you could set the runTimeout to xx hours in testsettings files and should be able to run tests more than 6 hours on successfully.
<Execution>
<Timeouts runTimeout="36000000" testTimeout="5400000" />
<AgentRule name="Execution Agents">
</AgentRule>
</Execution>
More details please refer the answer in this thread: TFS 2015 vNext : Test Run always abort after 6 hours
Okay, after going back through everything thoroughly, I discovered that there were actually TWO problems in my setup. The elusive one was that my runsettings file did NOT have the ForcedLegacyMode=True, which is apparently necessary for it to even look for the testsettings file. Once I corrected that, I discovered that it was not correctly pointing to my testsettings file. There is a further problem after that in that it's not discovering any tests now, but I think that might be due to a different problem, so I suspect the problem as originally stated is now resolved. Thanks for the suggestions!
In our company we use Gated Checkin to make sure commited code doesn't have any problems and also we run all of our unit tests there. We have around 450 unit tests.
To build the entire solution it takes 15-20 seconds and for tests maybe 3 mins on my local computer. When I build it on the server it takes 10 minutes. Why is that? Is there an extra stuff that will be fired that I don't know of?
Be aware that there are additional overheads (clean/get workspace is the main culprit most of the time) in the workflow prior to the actual build and then test cycle. I have seen the same behaviour myself and never really got to a point where the performance was that close to what it would be locally.
Once the build is running, you can view the progress and see where the time is being taken, this will also be in the logs.
In the build process parameters you can skip some extra steps if you just want to build the checked in code.
Set all these to False: Clean Workspace, Label sources, Clean build, Update work items with build number.
You could also avoid publishing (if you're doing it) or copying binaries to a drop folder (also, if you're doing it).
As others have suggested, take a look at the build log, it'll tell you what's consuming the time.
We just started using Visual Studio Release Management for one of our projects, and we're already having some problems with how we are doing things.
For now, we've created a single release stage, which is responsible for deploying our build artifacts to a dedicated virtual machine for testing. We intend to use this machine to run our integration tests later on.
Right now, we have a gated checkin build process: each checkin fires all the unit tests and we configured the release trigger to happen on this build also. At first, it seemed plausible that, after each checkin, the project was deployed and the integration tests were executed. We noticed that all released builds were polluting the console on Release Management, and that all builds were being marked as "Retain Indefinitely" and our drop folder location was growing fast (after seeing that, it makes sense that the tool automatically does this, since one could promote any build to another stage and the artifacts need to be persisted).
The question then is: what are we doing wrong? I've been thinking about this and it really does not make any sense to "release" every checkin. We should probably be starting this release process when a sprint ends, a point that can be considered a "release candidate".
If we do that though, how and when would we run our automated integration tests? I mean, a deployment process is required for running those in our case, and if we try to use other means to achieve that (like the LabTemplate build process) we will end up duplicating deployment code.
What is the best approach here?
It's tough to say without being inside your organization and looking at how you do things, but I'll take a stab.
First, I generally avoid gated checkin builds unless there's a frequent problem with broken builds. If broken builds aren't a pain point, don't use gated checkin. Why? Simple: If your build/test process takes 10 minutes to run, that's 10 minutes that I have to wait to know whether I can keep working, or if I'm going to get my changes kicked back out at me. It discourages small, frequent checkins and encourages giant, contextless checkins.
It's also 10 minutes that Developer B has to wait to grab Developer A's latest changes. If Developer B needs that checkin to keep working, that's wasted time. Trust your CI process to catch a broken build and your developers to take responsibility and fix them on the rare occasions when they occur.
It's more appropriate (depending on your branching strategy) to do a gated checkin against your trunk, and then CI builds against your dev/feature branches. Of course, that opens up the whole "how do I build once/deploy many when I have multiple branches?" can of worms. :)
If your integration tests are slow and require a deployment to succeed, they're probably not good candidates to run as part of CI. Have a CI/gated checkin build that just:
Builds
Runs fast unit tests
Runs high-priority, non-deployment-based integration tests
Then, have a second build (either scheduled, or rolling) that actually deploys and runs the whole test suite. You can schedule it according to your tastes -- I usually go with one at noon (or whatever passes for "lunch break" among the team), and one at midnight. That way you get a tested build from the morning's work, and one from the afternoon's work.
Using the Release Default Template, you can target your scheduled builds to just go as far as your "dev" (/test/integration/whatever you call it) stage. When you're ready to actually release a build, you can kick off a new release using that specific build that targets Production and let it go through all your stages normally.
Don't get tripped up on the 'Release' word. In MS Release Management (RM), creating a Release does not necessarily mean you will have this code delivered to your customers / not even that it has the quality to move out of dev. It only means you are putting a version of the code on your Release Path. This version/release can stop right in the first stage and that is ok.
Let's say you have a Release Path consisting of Dev, QA, Prod. In the course of a month, you may end up releasing 100 times in Dev, but only 5 times in QA and once in Prod.
You should drive to get each check-in deployed and integration tested. If tests takes a long time, only do the minimal during (gated or not) check-in (for example, unit tests + deployment), and the rest in your second stage of Release Path (which should be automatically triggered after first stage completes). It does not matter if second stage takes a long time. As a dev, check-in, once build completes successfully (and first stage), expect the rest to go smoothly and continue on your next task. (Note that only result of the first stage impacts your TFS build).
Most of the time, deployment and rest will run fine and so there won't be any impact to dev. Every now and then, you will have a failure in first stage, now the dev will interrupt his new work and get a resolution asap.
As for the issue that every build is kept indefinitely, for the time being, that is a side effect of RM. Current customers need to do the clean up manually (or script it). In the coming releases, a new retention policy for releases/builds will be put in place to improve this. This has not been worked on yet, but the intention would be to, for example, instruct RM to keep all releases that went to Prod, keep only the last 5 that went to QA and keep only the last 2 that went to Dev.
This is not a simple question, so also the answer must be articulated.
First of all, you will never keep all of your builds; the older a build, the less interesting to anyone; a build that doesn't get deployed in production is overtaken by builds that reaches that stage.
A team must agree on the criteria that makes a build interesting to keep around and how long to keep it. Define a policy for builds shipped to production or customers: how long do you support them? Until the next release, until the following one, for five years? Potentially shippable builds, still not in your customers' hands, are superseded by newer, so you can use a numeric or a temporal criteria (TFS implements only the first, as the second is more error-prone). Often you have more than one shippable build, when you want a safety net option and being able select from a pool which deliver (the one with more manageable bugs).
The TFS "Retain Indefinitely" should be used when you cannot automate the previous criteria, so you switch to a manually implemented policy. Indefinitely is not forever, means for an unknown time interval.