AOS workspaces: considerations

To set up Tosca Distributed Execution with Automation Object Service (AOS), you need to set up AOS workspaces. This topic takes you through important considerations for setting up AOS workspaces:

  • What they are, and what you should and shouldn't do with them.

  • How many you need to maximize performance.

Understand the basics

An AOS workspace is a "background" workspace that's only for AOS and not for testers. It gives the AOS access to all necessary test artifacts in the repository, so the service can forward them for execution and import results.

Keep these basics in mind:

  • DON'T let users work in an AOS workspace. If you do, you'll break the AOS.

  • DON'T use REST services with an AOS workspace. If you do, you'll break the AOS. The only exception to this rule is the AOS REST API, to perform special AOS workspace tasks.

  • DO adapt your synchronization policies in the AOS workspace, if you use synchronization to manage access. Make sure that the service has full access to all test artifacts.

Consider how many AOS workspaces you need

If you only use one AOS workspace, this workspace performs all tasks:

  • Generating all necessary objects for a test run and forwarding them to the Tosca Distribution Server for execution.

  • Importing test results.

For parallel execution, you can speed things up by creating multiple AOS workspaces.

Also, if you want to use Tosca Distributed Execution with AOS with multiple repositories, you must have multiple AOS workspaces: one per repository. However, to speed up parallel execution, you can also create multiple AOS workspaces for each repository.

Configurations

When you create multiple AOS workspaces for one repository, Tosca automatically splits the work between workspaces: one AOS workspace imports test results, the others generate and forward execution objects. This reduces the time Tosca Distributed Execution needs to get started.

You can make things even faster with an early access feature that lets you define multiple AOS workspaces for importing results in parallel. This also speeds up your time to results.

Recommendations

Generally, more AOS workspaces mean faster test runs and results. However, the process of distributing tasks between workspaces can eat up memory, so don't overdo it.

Here are our recommendations for a good number of AOS workspaces:

  • If you're just starting out, set up four AOS workspaces, with two of them for importing results.

  • If you see that your test runs are slow to start, add additional AOS workspaces. Unless the time it takes to start is extremely slow, add one AOS workspace at a time to figure out the right number.

  • If you see that results are slow to come back, add additional AOS workspaces for importing results. Generally, the number of import workspaces should be the same as the number of ExecutionLists that you run in parallel, on average. For example, if you tend to run between three to five ExecutionLists in parallel, try four AOS workspaces for importing results.

Please note that these are general recommendations. Depending on the size and complexity of your tests, you may need to adapt your numbers.

Maintain your AOS workspace

To ensure optimal performance of your AOS workspace, we recommend to compact it a maximum of three times per year.

Compact your AOS workspace

To compact your AOS workspace, follow these steps:

  1. Stop your current AOS service.

  1. Choose an option to compact your workspace:

  • Automatically, via workspace compacting.

  • Manually, via the command line ToscaWorkspaceCompactor -d "<workspace directory>".

    For example, the command line below compacts the Advanced Examples.db workspace located at C:\Tosca_Projects\Tosca_Workspaces\Advanced Examples\Repository:

    ToscaWorkspaceCompactor -d "C:\Tosca_Projects\Tosca_Workspaces\Advanced Examples\Repository\Advanced Examples.db"

  1. When the compacting process is complete, restart your AOS service Tricentis.ToscaAutomationObjectService.

What's next

Create your AOS workspaces: