Struggling with LoadTest Reports

Been two days I was struggling with troubleshooting Loadtest reports. Still I am not able to access the inbuilt LoadTest report which comes with VSTS 2008.

Thanks to Shai, for giving me this wonderful link which solved my purpose of reports.

Load Testing of SOA - Services

I've been searching for a method by which I can perform Load testing of the services of my application (SOA Based). I wrote few Unit tests which I used to run from the inbuilt Load Agent with VSTS 2008 and get the results.

I was searching for another way by which I can get the counters from the services itself. I figured out how that can be done.

In the app.config of the service we want to host, we can write the following

<configuration>
        <system.serviceModel>
    <diagnostics performanceCounters="All" />
        </system.serviceModel>
<\configuration>

This exposes all the performance counters from the service. There is a good article of this in MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms735098.aspx

The counters can be viewed in the performance monitor of the machine hosting the service.
For opening this write perfmon.exe in Run

Create a new Log Setting for the required counters. And start the log setting before you perform the Load Test. You have to give a path to the output of the log as per requirement. I did with .blg file and it gives a pretty slick graphical representation of the data for all the counters selected in the profile.

Auto-Generated Unit Tests for WCF services

A really cool tool that was released by Microsoft enables you to take a WCF trace file and a WCF client proxy, or a WCF interface contract, and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of calls found in the trace file. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing. The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

Click here to download the tool

LoadTest Controller

I was in the process of exploring Controller and Agent for Load testing using VSTS 2008. I am facing an issue in the same

"Failed to connect to remote Controller on machine 'tfs_Server', port '6901': No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it ."

In the process of troubleshooting the problem, I read in one of theblogs is to install Visual Studio 2008 SPI in all the machines involved. i.e Controller, Agent and Client

In my scenario my Controller and TFS Server was the same machine.
I installed it on all machine but after I installed it on my controller machine, I was then not able to connect to my TFS Server from any of my clients.
I got the error below on all my client machines

"TF31001: Team Foundation cannot retrieve the list of team projects from Team Foundation Server tfserver. The Team Foundation Server returned the following error: Team Foundation services are not available from the server.
Technical information (for administrator):
TF30059: Fatal error while initializing web service. "

Then I unstalled the SPI from the machine and then was able to successfully connect to the TFS Server

One more problem I faced then was I was getting error as below when I run my Load test.

"No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it "
On going to the Controller machine and checking the services, the service for the controller was stopped. I tried to start the service manually but then the service stopped by itself giving me a message.

"The Visual Studio Team Test Controller Service on Local Computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they have no work to do, for example, the Performance Logs and Alerts service. "

Then I realised that the whole problem was caused because my controller was a 90 Day or 25 Test Run trial.