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Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Tue Sep 14, 2010 6:10 pm
by ranoman
I have seen the load testing posts before, but I think mine is lind of a different scenario and hence I am starting a new thread. Below is my scenario:

[*]I have my windows forms application hosted on one paricular machine.
[*] I want users to be able to terminal server to that particular machine and use the application. In other words, I want to run my ranorex scripts logged in as a different terminal server users.

For now I want to be log in to the terminal server on 30 different sessions to run my scripts. I was assuming that I could login to a terminal server session fire up my scripts and close out of it and do it 30 times, logged in as different users. Apparantly Ranorex wont work this way.

From what I am seeing, looks like I would need 30 different monitors in order to "see" the application running, for the scripts to work successfully. Is this right?

If yes, it does not seem like a feasible option at all. What would my other options be? Are there any other tools that would help me accomplish this? Please help. This is kind of a high priority issue for me.

Thanks!

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 1:48 pm
by Support Team
Hi,
ranoman wrote:If yes, it does not seem like a feasible option at all. What would my other options be? Are there any other tools that would help me accomplish this? Please help. This is kind of a high priority issue for me.
I would suggest you a VNC Viewer like Real VNC to look at your terminal clients, because when you close the session the screen of the client gets locked and therefore Ranorex is not possible to recognize any elements. The same occurs when you minimize for example the Remote Desktop connections. So please install some kind of VNC Viewer and open your clients using the viewer. Then it should be possible to automate your 30 clients with only one monitor. :)

Regards,
Peter
Ranorex Team

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 8:03 pm
by ranoman
The problem with RealVNC or any VNC player for that matter is it does not allow for multiple logged in users who can do different things at the same time. It just allows for one logged in user. Even if you open up another VNC session, you will still only be able to log in as the same user.

I dont think a VNC player will work in a scenario I specified below. Am I missing anything?

Are there any other options? Or can I tweak a VNC player to work around this. Any help is highly appreciated.

Thanks!

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2010 11:29 pm
by Ciege
For now I want to be log in to the terminal server on 30 different sessions to run my scripts.
A question that I have for you is how do you accomplish this for real? Do you actually have a server that will allow 30+ unique users to open a unique desktop through term services and run their own applications? Must be one beefy machine to handle that.

Are you using something like Citrix to do this and each end using is using a Citrix client.
Are you able to remote in (RDP) to 30 unique sessions from 30 different computers?

I need to wrap my head around how you do this in the real world to see if it can be simulated in automation.

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 2:19 am
by ranoman
Do you actually have a server that will allow 30+ unique users to open a unique desktop through term services and run their own applications? Must be one beefy machine to handle that.
Yes, we have a server that will allow 30+ users to open a unique desktop through terminal services to run their own applications. And, yes it is a pretty beefy machine :) Believe it or not even real life users use our application in a similar manner, so we are exactly testing how our users would use them :)
Are you using something like Citrix to do this and each end using is using a Citrix client.
Nope. We are just using plain old mstsc . I remote to the server where my desktop app is hosted. Open up command prompt and fire up my scripts. I pretty much what I want to do 30 times
Are you able to remote in (RDP) to 30 unique sessions from 30 different computers?
Yes, I am able to remote to 30 unique sessions from 30 different computers.

Actually I have remoted to 4 unique sessions from on computer and fire up my scripts. I am thinking I can even remote to 30 sessions from one computer. I feel that the only reason I cannot to remote to 30 different sessions is because I dont have 30 different monitors. Tried RealVNC to get around it, but realVNC you cannot login as multiple users at the same time and do different things.

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 6:37 am
by artur_gadomski
Would 30 different Virtual Machines work? I don't know how virtual machines would handle remote desktop but it might just work.

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 3:46 pm
by Ciege
Well OK then... I wish I had that piece of hardware!

Anyway, you can try a RDP tool such as Royal TS. It allows you to (from a single window) open several RDP connections to several (or I assume) a single machine. Royal TS has a limitation of 10 RDP configurations for the free version, but not for the pay for version. May be worth it to try using 10 connections with Royal TS to see if that works for you.

With Royal TS each connection can be configured as a window within the app so minimizing the main app window or locking your host workstation does not have the effect of locking the connection window.

Also, if your host machine can handle it, like Artur suggested you could try using VMs to do this but that will probably be too resource intensive on your host machine to have 30 VMs running at once!

Here is the website for Royal TS: http://code4ward.net/main/ I use this as my every day RDP client of choice so I know it's good for that. Hopefully it can work for you too!

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 7:44 pm
by Ciege
So after reading some posts on the Royal TS forum it does appear that you can connect multiple sessions with different users to the same server. Just make sure that you configure each session to NOT connect to the console.

Although what I do not know is if there is any resource issue from the host machine when ramping up to 30 connections??? Trial and error for you it would seem. Please do let us know your results.

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Thu Sep 16, 2010 11:39 pm
by ranoman
Thanks Ciege! I am going to be testing that out later this evening. Will let you know how it goes :)

Re: Load Testing on terminal server sessions

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2010 4:47 pm
by ranoman
What I ended up doing for this was in the end pretty simple. I just opened up 25 terminal server sessions one on top the other and ran my scripts. This seemed to work fine, until we hit a CPU usage and memory bottleneck (which was expected), also some of the tests failed during the load test because it could find some of the elements (probably because I had left my time to find elements setting a little on the lower side around 2000 ms).

I am going to try and do this with Royal TS to see if I get better results.