Visual Studio Team Agents 2010 consists of Test Load Agent, Test Load Controller and Lab Agent. Team Test Load Agent monitors a request for a new test from the controller by running a service locally. Team Test Load Controller is run by a service, and the service controls the test agents and reports the status and errors of the test. It can also transfer the sources into running test and data collection in logic, or has effect on the system running the testing environment again.
The main function of Test Load Agent is to cascade various machines to produce heavier load and higher stress when doing the load test. It is rarely seen that an average level PC can produce a load of 50 people, which still cannot compare with some great websites or systems with thousands or more people online. Thus, enough load and stress can be produced when we connect several server level machines, so that the results will be meaningful to us.
More than 3 computers are required when using Load Agent, and VS 2010 For Tester, Controller, Agent1, Agent2, etc. are supposed to be installed. If the number of computers is limited, you can install the Controller and Agent in the same computer, but the test will be limited, as the picture below shows.
As the picture above shows that, Team Agents include the Agent and Controller software, which are highly extendable and customizable, so that the testers enjoy great flexibility. Testers can do load testing directing at Web apps and organizations to improve service quality by measuring the performance of Web apps and servers under load more accurately.
Application & Practice: to modify and test x64 bits CLR program set with VS 2010
Visual Studio Team Test 2010 Load Agent testing platform provides host process for the test. You can enjoy the new feature that network emulation has been introduced for performance testing, and what’s more, Visual Studio 2010 has developed another feature, which is that it can test the program set in 64bits CLR. With Visual Studio 2008, the host process can only be tested in the 32bits mode, and the internal storage has been limited to 2GB. But with Visual Studio Team Test 2010, there is no such limit.
Here are the steps to modify and test x64 bits CLR program set with VS 2010.
1) Set your program set as opening your program set on “Any CPU” platform, and open the “Build” tab, then set your platform target as “Any CPU”.
2) Open test settings, and set the host process platform as “MSIL”. Open the “Local.testsettings” to set and then choose “Hosts” and at last choose the MSIL under the Host Process Platform options.
Tips:
If you have not installed Test Load Agent, you will find that only one CPU will be occupied by the local requests when doing performance test with VS 2010. It is because the process to generate stress is VSTESTHost.exe. Accordingly, if you want every CPU of a multinuclear CPU to produce stress, you have to use Visual Studio Team System Test Load Agent.