I decided to give LoadRunner 11.50 a try because one of my clients is upgrading to the newer version of VuGen as part of their migration to Performance Center. I tried a simple recording and replay against the VTS2 web application (which I’m also evaluating). The script ran without problems and populated rows in VTS as I expected, but I saw this error in the replay log.
I’m using Windows 8 and LoadRunner 11.50 build 2216. I looked in the HP support and found an article (which for some reason I can no longer find!) that suggested that the way to resolve this was to run any LoadRunner script once as an administrator. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have “cured VuGen” of this fault.
This solution worked for me, here are the steps that I took:
Right click the VuGen shortcut and choose the option to “run as administrator”
Run the script once, the error should not appear.
Close VuGen
I re-tested this using VuGen as a non-administrative user and can confirm that this problem no longer exists.
My followers on Twitter and LinkedIn will already be aware that I went to the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas last week. They’ll have heard tales of lost baggage, extreme “jet-lag induced tiredness” (body-clock waking me at 3:30 every morning) as well as various updates from the conference.
People go to the conference for a variety of reasons; to hear the keynote speeches, attend NDA sessions, see application demonstrations or to meet HP product managers,R&D teams or other experts. I’ve been part of Vivit for over 4 years now and before that I was a member of the Mercury software user group. For me the highlight of my conference was meeting up with a group of fellow testers one evening over a glass or two of whisky (thanks Mr Moore)
Left to Right. Wilson Mar, Scott Hysmith, James Pulley, Richard Bishop, Scott Moore
These testers have inspired me from my first days as a tester when I used to frequent Wilson Mar’s website and Scott Moore’s loadtester.com. I knew James Pulley through his moderation of Google, Yahoo and StackOverflow LoadRunner groups and more recently I’ve been listening to James Pulley and Mark Tomlinson’s PerfBytes podcasts.
I sincerely hope that this becomes a regular event at conferences. It was great to finally meet these people face to face and “put the testing world to rights” 🙂
My electricity supplier in the UK recently sent me a electricity consumption meter which tracks energy use in real time and displays in on a small LCD panel. This has proved to be a real eye opener for me and has helped me to see how much power is used by a variety of devices in the house. I’ve found myself checking the meter at regular intervals and I’m getting good at working out which things are powered on just by checking the meter!
Electricity Consumption Meter
I’m one of those geeky types that likes to leave my home PC on all the time. This means that when I’m away from home, I can connect to the PC remotely and pick up files or refer to old email archives that I don’t keep on my laptop. I haven’t given this much thought until now but I checked the power consumption of my PC and saw that it draws 250W – 300W whenever it’s powered on. I did some rough calculations to see what this was costing me and I was surprised.
Daily power use for my PC = 0.275 KW x 24 = 6.6 KWh
Annual power use for my PC = 6.6 KWh x 365 = 2409 KWh
Average cost in the UK for 1 KWh = £0.14
Annual cost for running my PC all the time = £0.14 x 2409 KWh = £337.26
This made me think about turning my PC off more (as my wife has been suggesting for years) 😉 But I don’t want to lose the ability to turn it on remotely and get access to files….. hence my use of WOL (Wake on Lan).
I recently bought a Raspberry Pi and I’ve been tinkering with it for a while, I’ve used it for time lapse photography and general experimentation. I’ve also put one in the Trust IV office in Manchester which operates a webcam. I thought that I could use the low-powered Raspberry Pi to wake up my high-powered PC when I need it and I’d enable power management on the PC to put the PC to sleep when it isn’t in use.
Installed “wakeonlan” on the Pi, using the command [sudoapt-getinstall wakeonlan]
Installed Apache on the Pi, using the command [sudo apt-get install apache2]
Installed PHP5 on the Pi using the command [sudoapt-getinstallphp5]
Wrote a small PHP script that sends the wakeonlan command to my PC.
Changed the default port for the webserver
Enabled port forwarding on my router to forward HTTP requests from outside to the Pi.
RPi screenshot
The PHP script (above) is pretty straightforward and uses the “exec” command to simply execute the wakeonlan command. I may improve this to give myself some visual feedback to show that the magic packet has been sent to the PC. For now I’m just happy that I can reduce my energy consumption and still access my PC remotely whenever I want to.
Assuming that this gives me a 50% energy saving, this should reduce the electricity bill by more than £150 per annum.
