I was trying to run a load test using Visual Studio Team Test Edition yesterday for a large data set and came across an error that said:

Error occurred running test. (Computer LOADTESTMACHINE) Could not access the load test results repository: The load test results repository is out of space. Allocate more space to the repository (if possible), or delete results of older load test runs.

Visual Studio dumps test results in a local instance of MS SQL Server Express and it was easy enough to guess that this was due to SQL Server Express exceeding the db size cap of 4GB (non-Express editions don’t have this cap). I have been running largish load tests on this machine for 8-9 months now and it made sense that I would run out of space.

I went looking for a solution and saw that Microsoft devs have suggested in forums and in blog posts that the DB be cleaned up via SQL to delete test results older than a time period of your choice.

Two things surprised me:

• There is no UI option to manage this in Visual Studio. Before I ran the sql commands, I tried deleting old test results via the “Test Results” window in VS. This apparently deletes exported test results - I am not sure what else it does but it didn’t seem to clean up the DB for the test results. So this means that if you want to clean up your DB when you run into these kind of issues, you need to talk dirty to SQL Server directly. Feels unclean. I Would like to know if I am missing something because this seems like something that shouldn’t require testers even going near a SQL Script.
• I tried and could not find any formal guidance or documentation on msdn to address this issue, even in Practices & Patterns. I may have missed it totally so I hope somebody corrects me if this is actually there. This would be a pretty common scenario I would think so it deserves better than users needing to search blogs and the forums for an answer.

The script I ran is included with this post. A few things to keep in mind:

1. This script cleans up only Load Test Results
2. If you are using a typical installation of Visual Studio Team Test Edition, you need to run this against the db named “LoadTest” on the locally installed instance of MS SQL Server Express installed during Visual Studio installation.
3. Change the value of the @DaysToKeep variable to a suitable value in days. I have set it to 30 days in the script so that results older than 30 days are deleted.
   --@DaysToKeep - indicates the number of previous days records to keep. For example "30" indicates that I want to delete test results older than 30 days
DECLARE @DaysToKeep int
Set @DaysToKeep = 30
4. This script may take a very long time to run - think in terms of hours rather than minutes. It took about 2-2.5 hours in my case. So, don’t abort the execution because you think the script is stuck.

The script (rename to .sql):
deleteoldloadtestresults.txt

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under VSTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.