British Summertime and Visual Studio Team Test
Load Test Clocks Movement
I was running a Load / Stability test on the weekend and noticed something strange with my results.
I kicked off my test at around 19:15 and after about 29 hours and 45 mins the webservers stopped responding.
At first I thought it was a network outage or something of the like, then I looked at the packets that my machine had sent to the server to check if it was a request or response issue. It seemed that my machine had stopped sending packets also. This ruled out a network issue as that would only stop responses and not request. So while I was scratching my head I remembered that the clocks in the UK had moved forward an hour on Saturday Night/Sunday Morning.
That was my answer. British Summer Time messing with my test results.
So clocks moving froward are one thing as you miss an hour so it looks like at no results on your test for this period (this is the non-existent hour of the movement of the clocks)
thinking about I thought what would happen for Winter when the clocks move backward. Would the Load Test send the page requests through twice for the same period. So that I get two sets of results for the hour 29-30 in my load test?.
Just a minor anomaly I noticed.