Xenapp Lingering Interferes with Vugen Recording in LoadRunner
Posted on Sep, 2013 by Admin
Recently one of our LoadRunner consultants was experiencing Vugen recording issues using the Citrix/Xenapp protocol. After some investigation into the configuration settings on the Xenapp server, a focus was placed on the “Linger” setting. When it was turned on, the session could not be properly hooked into by the recording engine of Vugen. Here is what Citrix says about this setting:
Linger settings
A user session ends after user processes and visible windows end (for example, when a user exits from an application, the session ends). You can use session linger to provide a better user experience by eliminating the launch delay between applications.
To use session linger for named user sessions, configure the following Citrix User policy settings:
- Linger Terminate Timer Interval specifies the number of minutes a session remains active after the last application terminates. If a new application starts during this interval, the user session returns to the active monitoring state. If no application starts during this interval, the session ends. If this policy setting is not used, session linger is disabled.
- Linger Disconnect Timer Interval specifies the number of minutes to wait after lingering begins before disconnecting the session. If a new application starts during this interval, the user session returns to the active monitoring state. It is possible that other factors may cause a session to be disconnected before the Linger Disconnect Timer Interval expires. If this policy setting is not used, a lingering session will not disconnect.
Anonymous user sessions do not have a disconnected state; they are either active or terminated. Therefore, if the Linger Terminate Timer Interval and Linger Disconnect Timer Interval policy settings are used, the effective Linger Terminate Timer Interval setting is the same as the Linger Disconnect Timer Interval setting.
For a non-seamless named user session, the disconnected session remains in the disconnected state until the Linger Terminate Timer Interval expires.
Once I the Linger setting was disabled, window names that were previously missing began to be recognized. In this instance, we also needed to drop the session timeout down to 1 minute. You will still have to wait at least one minute before trying to record against the same session/user. For Citrix deployed applications being tested with LoadRunner, it is important to understand all of the setting on the Xenapp server and be sure they are compatible with recording and testing.
More information about lingering and session state in Xenapp can be found at:
