Hi -

NCrunch does have exactly this feature :) When you're connected to remote servers, try right clicking on any test in the Tests Window. You should see an option under the context menu allowing you to choose to run the test on a specific server.

Thanks - I've made a note to look at ways of making this accessible via keyboard.

NCrunch will instantiate a new test runner process when told to run the tests on a specific server. It's rare that people want to re-use old processes, so the decision was made to try and keep the options as simple as possible.

Unfortunately I know of no way to make individual VS commands for each server. The commands themselves are registered with VS statically through a tightly integrated process that NCrunch has little control over.

The logic for test execution on the server is more or less the same as that for the client. Tasks in the queue that are created from the standard 'Run tests in new task runner process' are marked to always run in a new process. This means a new process will be created for each task in the queue. If you use this option on a large number of slow running tests, there will be an increase in processing time as each individual task needs to be launched inside a new process.

Where tasks are queued using any other way, the processes will be re-used between tasks.

Considering your use case, I'm wondering if you can share any details on your reasoning behind using the 'Run tests on server' so frequently in your workflow. The idea behind the distributed processing was to allow the engine to take care of this sort of thing so that you wouldn't need to think about which server was doing the work. Do you have tests that can only run on a specific server?

The logical approach to me would seem to be to introduce a configuration setting that controls whether tests told to run on a remote server require a new task runner or not. Still, I'd like to avoid this if at all possible, as the number of options in increased has been rapidly increasing to try and cater for so many specialised scenarios.

Hrm am I missing something here. I do the following:
** (local) **
1) Engine is idle
2) I modify a test by adding a space character
3) It runs the test locally and it takes ~10s
4) I modify the same test again with space character
5) It runs the test locally <1s.

** remote **
1) Engine is idle
2) I modify a test by adding a space character
3) It runs the test remotely and it takes ~10s
4) I modify the same test again with space character
5) It runs the test remotely and it takes ~10s


Isn't it supposed to reuse process on remote server? When looking at processes on remote server a new nCrunch.TaskRunner45.x86.exe is always started.

It is only who is using server, it has task capacity of 4, "terminate test runner tasks when all test execution is complete" is unchecked, "max number of test runner processes to pool" is 4 (1 default, I guess it should be same as task capacity to optimize reusing processes?).

Thanks.

I've done some more testing on this, but I can't seem to reproduce the issue.

I'm wondering if there's any chance you could reproduce this in a simple scenario, then send me the log file from the grid node that covers the execution of these tests?

Also check to make sure that you've set your 'Max number of processing threads' on your local machine to 0. I forgot to change this initially in my testing and it gave me some confusing results with the tests being run both locally and on the node.