Hi, thanks for posting!
Usually when this sort of symptom is reported (i.e. system overloaded, not responding, etc), the underlying problem is in the nature of the tests that are being executed. NCrunch exerts very tight control over processing resources used during test execution, although it cannot control external services/applications that are being used by integration tests.
For example, you may have a database system running on your workstation that is being called by your tests when they execute. When a large request is made of the database, it increases its resource consumption. NCrunch cannot restrict the resource consumption of processes outside its control, so the database consumes more than its fair share and brings the workstation to its knees.
There are many ways of solving an issue like this, although the best approach will always depend upon your development environment and test suite. From an NCrunch configuration perspective, I would recommend that you try marking heavy integration tests with the
ExclusivelyUsesAttribute to prevent them from running in parallel with each other and overloading your system. As a long term goal, it's often good to try and focus on reducing the size of datasets used for integration tests so that they require less resources and execute quicker - though I realise that in reality this isn't always possible or feasible to achieve.
The 'ignored test' system for NCrunch is inclusive rather than exclusive, so the only way for the system to configure itself for the scenario you've described is by creating many ignoredtests entries in the configuration file. If your tests can still run individually in NCrunch without functional problems (i.e. you are only ignoring them to reduce resource consumption), I would have to recommend other ways to manage this situation. You may find it more practical to categorise your tests, then configure the
engine modes to avoid running heavy tests automatically. This means you can still run the tests manually without losing code coverage information for them (which is immediately cleared when the test is ignored).
Cheers,
Remco
