Extreme PC slowdown when debugging a UFT action with TestAdvantage

Hi guys,

As you are aware from my previous forum post (http://www.infragistics.com/community/forums/t/105524.aspx) I recently resolved the issue between UFT & TestAdvantage and have been able to successfully record the IG controls in our application as intended.  I’m experiencing extreme PC slowdown when debugging these however and am wondering if there’s a cure to this or, if not, maybe you have some tips about what I could do differently to minimize the affects of this.

I’ve uploaded a new video to YouTube so you can see what I’m experiencing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSLKY8F1Z9s

I started to draft an email to HPE but before sending it decided to try on a different PC to see if the behavior was the same.  Last week, when attempting to resolve my aforementioned issues, I’d installed UFT on an older desktop along with TestAdvantage.  After playing around with this I deactivated TestAdvantage so I could reactivate on my main PC.  Consequently when I recreated my Action using the recorder on this older desktop the script contained the generic instructions rather than being IG specific but debugging was considerably quicker than on my own PC.  This leads me to think the issue might be with TestAdvantage rather than UFT.

So back to my main PC which is shown in the YouTube video.  I right-click the first line of code in the Action and select “Debug from Step…”.  After clicking “Run” in the next dialog is where everything starts to go very slowly.  Pressing F10 to jump to the next line takes a long time and attempting to highlight a code statement in order to add a Watch is extremely slow.  At about 2 minutes into the video I bring my Task Manager into view and it doesn’t really show anything excessive.  The SnagIt process is the biggest and that’s my screen recorder, but overall CPU & memory consumption isn’t stretched.  And the hard disk light blinks every second or so meaning there isn’t a bunch of activity there either.  My laptop (Dell Latitude E5540) is 1 or 2 years old with an i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz 2.70 GHz with 16GB of RAM and running Win7-64.  Every application running on my PC is impacted at this time so swapping between the UFT window and a browser or email for example takes a very long time.  Stopping the debugger takes a long time but once stopped everything runs at normal speed again.  My Record | Record and Run Settings option was set to “Record and run test on any open Windows-based application” so I changed this to point to the specific application being debugged but that didn’t make a difference.

Do you have any advice on what might be going on and what I could change to improve the performance?

Thank you in advance,

Jason.

Hi Jason,

     There is nothing specific that I can think of that would cause that, except for rather specific settings. Two are in Tools-> Options, GUI Testing -Test Runs, Run mode, make sure it's set to Fast, that is the default, but if you set it at some point to something else, it stays. The other being Active Screen, typically it affects recording, and affects WPF and Web, more than Winforms, but it may affect Debug as well. Set it to Capture level None. 
   We have some internal wait settings in IG TestAutomation, proxy settings that allow you to raise the wait time, but unless it's in your script or you actively changed it in your swfconfig, most of them default to zero, with one at 0.125 seconds, but that is only for exception retries, to allow for proper repainting. If you set those settings in Winforms via the SetProxySetting method in your script, the lifecycle for that setting is for the playing of the script.

   That being said, there is nothing on our end that would cause the slow down that you are experiencing. Do you get a big difference between Run from step and Debug from step, and commenting out everything before that point and just hitting run. If you get a big difference between those than my guess the issue is on HP's side and how they load assemblies, what they inject themselves into and collisions that may occur based on that when they go into to "Debug" mode.

Michael Germann
Software Development Team Lead
Infragistics

Following are some hacks that prevent slow performance in your system:

• Perform a Hardware Test
• Try the Performance troubleshooter
• Uninstall programs you never use
• Defragment your Hard Drive
• Clean up your Hard Drive
• Run fewer programs at the same time
• Check for Viruses and Spyware
• Check Dell Latitude E5540 Manual for Additional performance troubleshooting information.