Asynchronous Invocation of a Load Test from a Continuous Integration System

Why the fancy pants title? A Microsoft recruiter asked for my resume for some load testing related stuff and my blog is on my resume so I figured I needed some high falutin' titles. Hopefully they don't read anything but the titles. :-)

Anyway...

I'm getting to the point where I need to be able to invoke a load test after the nightly build and automagically run a load test. Now, I know, right now you're saying to yourself, "Hey, a nightly build doesn't constitute a continuous integration system!" And I agree, however, "Continuous Integration System" sounds much more impressive than just "nightly build." ;-)

Back to the important stuff: How am I going to invoke a Load Test on another machine after the nightly build is done? Right now I am working everything out with that super-duper handy utility, psexec from the UberBrains at SysInternals (now part of Microsoft).

I have recently build a stand alone server that I had installed SQL Server 2005, VS2008 TSTE and my custom LoadTestResults database where I store summary information from runs that I will be reporting from. On that server which I will refer to as my Load Test Controller, I setup a machine account user account by the name of TestRunner. During my trial and errors I found that I had to add TestRunner to the Administrators group but I need to go back and play around with that some to see if there is a more secure way to invoke the nightly automagic load test.

On the Load Test Controller I have two batch files: trigger.bat and loadtest.bat.

trigger.bat:

8<----------------------------
@echo off
echo Cry havoc and let slip loose the dogs of loadtest!
start C:\LoadTest\Trigger\loadtest.bat
---------------------------->8

The start command allows the async execution of the second batch file loadtest.bat, where the load test is really started.

loadtest.bat:

8<----------------------------
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\"
MSTest.exe /testcontainer:c:\LoadTest\LoadTests\MyLoadTest\MyLoadTest\MyReallyCoolLoadTest.loadtest
---------------------------->8

I can call trigger.bat from psexec with any automated process that can shell out to the command line or execute a batch file. Here is an example of starting a load test on the Load Test Controller using psexec from the command line:

8<----------------------------
C:\>psexec \\loadtestbox -u testrunner -p testrunner cmd /c c:\loadtest\trigger\trigger.bat

PsExec v1.92 - Execute processes remotely
Copyright (C) 2001-2007 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com


Cry havoc and let slip loose the dogs of loadtest!
c:\loadtest\trigger\trigger.bat exited on loadtestbox with error code 0.
---------------------------->8

Even though psexec exit back to the command line, the load test is actually running on my Load Test Controller:



I was having problems getting results to be automagically saved to the Load Test Results Repository. I figured the SQL connection string was stored in the VS2008 solution but I had to open up VS2008 on my Load Test Controller machine and manually add the connection string for my TestRunner profile. After that, the LoadTest database is updated with each execution. w00t!

Now it's off to add the automagic reporting SP calls via osql.