Capture-replay Tools
Nancie Fazzari
GUI capture & replay tools have been developed for testing the applications against graphical user interfaces. Using a capture and replay tool, testers can run an application and record the interaction between a user and the application. The Script is recorded with all user actions including mouse movements and the tool can then automatically replay the exact same interactive session any number of times without requiring a human intervention. This supports fully automatic regression testing of graphical user interfaces.
In the contemporary world, everything is dynamic, ever changing. One has to keep pace with the heterogeneous environments. Talking about software systems, when a product is deployed, the way a software system has responded during test phase may not be the same in a real world scenario.As a measure to address the issues that one may come across while interacting with the software application, we have a technique that comes to our rescue which enables capturing and replaying the execution patterns of the deployed software. It is precisely a method to capture the interactions that take place from the interface upto the backend.
We can understand the concept of Capture and replay in the context of GUI capture and replay tools. These tools test an application with their graphical interface. The capture and replay tool will simply record the user interactions with the system. Let us have a look at the different types of tools that offer capture and replay facility.
Rodrigo Urra is the GFXReconstruct technical lead for the Developer Tools Group at AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
LunarG initially developed GFXReconstruct to capture/replay Vulkan applications. This free-use, open-source tool has seen broad adoption by Vulkan developers. Through a joint venture between AMD and LunarG, GFXReconstruct has been extended to also support capture/replay of applications using the DirectX ecosystem.
D3D12 is the de facto standard for gaming on the Windows platform and has been used in the development and deployment of hundreds of titles since its release. The addition of D3D12 support to GFXReconstruct provides developers with another valuable tool to help analyze and debug D3D12 applications. Plus, since this latest version of GFXReconstruct continues to be made available through an open-source license, developers can use this tool freely and can choose to contribute back to the community by providing enhancements, support, or bug fixes.
The GFXReconstruct package is a customizable Swiss army knife when it comes to capture/replay tools. On the capture side, GFXReconstruct provides proxy libraries that record graphics API calls to a capture file on disk. On the replay side, GFXReconstruct provides a series of command-line tools and scripts to read and process capture files.
The most frequently used capture file processing tools are gfxrecon-replay and gfxrecon-optimize. The gfxrecon-replay tool replays capture files, and the gfxrecon-optimize tool produces new capture files with improved replay performance. Please see the documentation for more information on all the tools available in GFXReconstruct.
The software architecture behind GFXReconstruct is also quite extensible. It is written in such a way that developers can implement support for capturing other graphics APIs and develop custom consumers/tools for processing the content of capture files.
First, the optimizer will trim out creation of unreferenced pipeline state objects (PSOs). This action can dramatically reduce capture file load time for cases when the source application created thousands of PSOs that were not referenced in the captured frames.
Second, the optimizer will analyze a DXR workload and inject specialized commands that help gfxrecon-replay quickly fetch the GPU virtual addresses it needs. This action allows replay performance to match the original application more closely.
Mesh nodes are a new type of leaf node in work graphs that, unlike all other nodes, does not invoke a compute shader, but dispatches a mesh-shader graphics pipeline instead. This blog series covers how to get started with mesh nodes as well as best practices.
You'll need to use a tool that's capable of replaying pcap files. No special trick to it. An example would tcpreplay. A simple search for "replay pcap file" will turn up even more tools gloriously up to date within the very second that you hit enter in your search engine of choice.
I wanted to capture some SNMP traps and keep them to test my application later. So I don't want to generate traps each time I wanted to test my application.I would like to post how I have done this. Hope this may help someone.
The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature helps you assess the effect of future SQL Server upgrades. You can also use it to help assess the effect of hardware and operating system upgrades, and SQL Server tuning.
Distributed Replay is deprecated as of SQL Server 2022 (16.x), as noted in Deprecated database engine features in SQL Server 2022 (16.x). Distributed Replay has a dependency on SQL Server Native Client (SNAC), which was removed from SQL Server 2022 (16.x). This change is documented in Support Policies for SQL Server Native Client. In addition, Distributed Replay relies on .trc files, which are captured with SQL Trace and SQL Server Profiler, both of which are also deprecated.
The Distributed Replay Controller has been removed from SQL Server 2022 (16.x) Setup, and the Distributed Replay Client is no longer available in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) starting with version 18. To obtain the Distributed Replay Controller, you must install SQL Server 2019 (15.x) or an earlier version. To obtain the Distributed Replay Client, you must install SSMS 17.9.1.
Similar to SQL Server Profiler, you can use Distributed Replay to replay a captured trace against an upgraded test environment. Unlike SQL Server Profiler, Distributed Replay isn't limited to replaying the workload from a single computer.
Distributed Replay offers a more scalable solution than SQL Server Profiler. With Distributed Replay, you can replay a workload from multiple computers and better simulate a mission-critical workload.
The Distributed Replay feature can use multiple computers to replay trace data and simulate a mission-critical workload. Use Distributed Replay for application compatibility testing, performance testing, or capacity planning.
You can use SQL Server Profiler to replay a captured trace against an upgraded test environment. You can also analyze the replay results to look for potential functional and performance incompatibilities. However, SQL Server Profiler can only replay a workload from a single computer. When replaying an intensive OLTP application that has many active concurrent connections or high throughput, SQL Server Profiler can become a resource bottleneck.
Distributed Replay administration tool: A console application, DReplay.exe, used to communicate with the distributed replay controller. Use the administration tool to control the distributed replay.
Distributed Replay controller: A computer running the Windows service named SQL Server Distributed Replay controller. The Distributed Replay controller orchestrates the actions of the distributed replay clients. There can only be one controller instance in each Distributed Replay environment.
Distributed Replay clients: One or more computers (physical or virtual) running the Windows service named SQL Server Distributed Replay client. The Distributed Replay clients work together to simulate workloads against an instance of SQL Server. There can be one or more clients in each Distributed Replay environment.
The Distributed Replay administration tool, controller, and client can be installed on different computers or the same computer. There can be only one instance of the Distributed Replay controller or client service that is running on the same computer.
The input trace data must contain specific events and columns to be replayed by Distributed Replay. The TSQL_Replay template in SQL Server Profiler contains all of the required events and columns, in addition to extra information. For more information about that template, see Replay Requirements.
Supported operating systems for running the administration tool and the controller and client services is the same as your SQL Server instance. For more information about which operating systems are supported for your SQL Server instance, see SQL Server 2016 and 2017: Hardware and software requirements.
Any one computer can only have a single instance of each Distributed Replay feature installed. The following table lists how many installations of each feature are allowed in a single Distributed Replay environment.
Although only one instance of the administration tool can be installed on a single computer, you can start multiple instances of the administration tool. Commands issued from multiple administration tools are resolved in the order in which they are received.
We recommend that the target server is located in a test environment. To replay trace data against a different instance of SQL Server than it was originally recorded, make sure that the following steps have been done on the target server:
The database IDs on the target ideally should be the same as those on the source. However, if they aren't the same, matching can be performed based on DatabaseName if it's present in the trace.
The default database for each login that is contained in the trace data must be set (on the target server) to the respective target database of the login. For example, the trace data to be replayed contains activity for the login, Fred, in the database Fred_Db on the original instance of SQL Server. Therefore, on the target server, the default database for the login, Fred, must be set to the database that matches Fred_Db (even if the database name is different). To set the default database of the login, use the sp_defaultdb system stored procedure.
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