Using LoadRunner / Performance Center to kill a rogue process

I recently saw a question in a discussion forum for LoadRunner and after replying with a potential solution for a friend of mine, I thought that I’d share my solution here as well. My friend was testing using a Citrix client and when the script failed, the Citrix client was left running. This meant that subsequent test iterations would all fail as well.

Testers using other thick clients such as SAPGUI, RDP, TruClient (using Firefox or Chrome), QTP or UFT may also face this issue.

One way to resolve the problem of orphaned process such as this would be to use a command line function to kill the offending process when an error is detected. In the example below, the script kills any instance of the “calc.exe” (calculator) process. You should replace “calc.exe” with the name of the executable / rogue process.

 

 

 

 

 

N.B. You need to be extremely careful with this code (for obvious reasons).

Website videos black / dark for first few seconds – FIXED

This has been annoying me for ages… When I say ages, I mean 6 months or more. When I start to watch a video in Chrome on a website like YouTube or BBC News, the first few seconds of the video are dark and pixellated. I’ve tried new video drivers and other setting changes but none have worked until now.

This first image shows what a video looks like when it starts to run in Chrome.

2016-11-09-18_57_18-donald-trumps-speech-in-full-bbc-news
When I realised that the same videos played well in Internet Explorer, Edge and Firefox, I decided that it had to be one of the Chrome settings. After some trial and error, I discovered this flag:
chrome://flags/#disable-accelerated-video-decode  .

I disabled this which means that Chrome wasn’t trying to use hardware acceleration on my graphics card. This fixed my problem.
2016-11-09-18_57_49-donald-trumps-speech-in-full-bbc-news
After disabling hardware acceleration, my videos are clear, right from the first second of replay – a great improvement.

Batch file to delete files older than x days from folders in Windows

I’ve been working for a client over recent months and part of my resposibility has been to look after a number of servers used for performance testing. Occasionally drives fill up on the server farm causing outages and obvious interruptions to testing.

It would be a near full-time job to manage all these servers, so to reduce the chance of temporary files from filling up drives and causing problems, I looked into creating a scheduled task to delete old temporary files. Since my server estate is varied, I didnt want to use PowerShell so I opted for an old “DOS” command, FORFILES.

This seems to have done the trick for me:
forfiles /s /m *.* /d -7 /c "cmd /c del @path"

(This command deletes all files that are more than 7 days old from the folder in which it runs.)

Update – To remove folders as well:
forfiles /S /D -7 /C "cmd /c IF @isdir == TRUE RMDIR @path /S /Q"

(This command deletes all folders that are more than 7 days old from the folder in which it runs. – Run it after deleting the files with the command above.)