Could Someone Give me Advice on Optimizing NCrunch Performance for Large-Scale Solutions?

Hello there,

I am working on a large-scale solution in Visual Studio that includes several projects; each containing numerous unit and integration tests. While I have found NCrunch to be a fantastic tool for continuous testing and enhancing productivity; I have been running into performance issues as the size of the solution has grown. NCrunch tends to slow down considerably when running tests across multiple projects simultaneously; and this delay is starting to impact my workflow.

I have already tried adjusting the grid node settings and changing the CPU core allocation; but the performance improvement has been minimal. I am aware that optimizing NCrunch for larger solutions requires some tweaking; but I am not sure what other configurations or strategies I should consider.


What are the best practices for configuring NCrunch to handle large solutions with hundreds of tests efficiently?

Are there any recommended exclusion or prioritization strategies for tests that could improve performance without losing key functionality?

Has anyone found success using NCrunchs distributed processing features with grid nodes? If so; how much of a performance boost did you notice?

Also, I have gone through this post; https://forum.ncrunch.net/yaf_postst1599_Various-performance-issues-on-large-minitab-project.aspx which definitely helped me out a lot.

Thanks in advance for your help and assistance.

Hi, thanks for posting.

The advice in this situation does vary a bit depending on the nature of the performance issue. Which of the following do you feel you are experiencing?

- The IDE feels sluggish and doesn't respond well to user input when the engine is running
- Tests are timing out due to not running fast enough on the machine(s) involved
- It feels like test results are taking too long to come back
- The NCrunch engine takes too long to respond to activities in the UI (for example, if you change the filters on the Tests Window, it takes ages to respond). This would be correlated with consistently high 'engine core load' if you mouse over the corner spinner