Put your LoadRunner scripts on diet!

There are multiple ways of making LR script folder a bit smaller in size which could be beneficial, if the script needs to be archived and stored for extended periods of time. Just to name a few methods here:

Operate from ZIP file

• Saving and opening LoadRunner scripts in ZIP archives
• Saving LoadRunner scripts in compressed Windows folders
• Removing unnecessary files

Maintaining big script repository and taking regular backup of the entire script repository could be very disk-space hungry exercise particularly if all runtime data files and execution results are also unnecessarily being backed up.

As an example simple few steps script could have size of about 10MB after recording and the folder size could grow to 13MB after script execution which is about 30% increase. This increase in size caused by run-time data files, logs, VUGen execution result folders and backup files which are not required for the script to work properly.

I want to make clear here what I mean when I say VUGen execution result folders I don’t mean a result folder which is created during LR scenario execution. VUGen results are stored within a script folder and are created when the script is run on its own from within VUGen and are called result1, result2, result3, etc.

The simplest solution to save some space quickly (which I’ve been using for the past years) is to remove VUGen execution result folders which will usually release few hundred MB of disk space without removing any vital part of the script.

Additional space can be released by removing variety of other files which I will now explain.

Folders:

• data – useful folder containing html files, pictures and other items captured by LaodRunner during recording. I would recommend keeping that folder within the script folder but if the disk space usage is crucial and scripts size needs to be reduced for archiving this folder could also be deleted. It is not required for successful execution of the test script.
  result1 – default result directory for VUGen execution result folder. Note that tester can specify different result folder manually. LR will create folder with next number if it is not possible to obtain full rights to result1 folder.
• .DS_Store – this folder is not created by LR or even Windows operating system but by Mac OS. It can be created if someone accesses script folder from Mac which might be the case if the scripts are stored in shared location such as corporate shared drive.

File extensions:

• idx – binary index file for used to store parameter values
• bac – backup files for script, output, and other types of VUGen files
• ci – it is a final Compiled Image of the LR script

Full file names:

• pre_cci.c – concatenation of all C code and lrun.h header file
• output.txt – same text which is displayed in LR GUI in Replay Log
• options.txt – options passed to the LR compiler pre-processor
• logfile.txt – additional log file
• logfile.log – additional log file
• mdrv_cmd.txt – parameters passed to the mdrv.exe utility which compiles and runs the LR script

Other files with random filename parts (asterisk represents random part in the file name):

• combined_*.c – concatenated/combined list of header files used by LR script
• mdrv*.log – log file for the mdrv.exe process

All of those files could be removed manually with a help of windows build-in search utility. In order to simplify that task I’ve built small but mighty tool in VBSctript which can automate this task.

To learn more about a clean-up tool for LR script folders please read on here. You will find a link to the utility and brief explanation on how to configure it to your linking.

If you want to understand how LaodRunner compiler is working "under to hood" have a look at this the LoadTester website.