How Can I Increase the Timeout for Visual Studio Tests?

Question

I'm working on a pretty sizable suite of tests for some code I'm writing (in Visual Studio 2012). For the most part, running the unit tests is no big deal. But I'm also including a lot of integration tests which have more external infrastructure dependencies. The number of tests, combined with re-setting the infrastructure dependencies between tests, has resulting in a rather lengthy test run for the full suite (around 45 minutes at the moment).

Running the tests is no big deal. Unit tests will be run on check-in, integration tests nightly. However, I'm running into an issue when trying to analyze code coverage for all of the tests. No code coverage results are created, and the output window says the following:

This request operation sent to net.pipe://megara/vstest.discoveryengine/14108 did not receive a reply within the configured timeout (00:30:00). The time allotted to this operation may have been a portion of a longer timeout. This may be because the service is still processing the operation or because the service was unable to send a reply message. Please consider increasing the operation timeout (by casting the channel/proxy to IContextChannel and setting the OperationTimeout property) and ensure that the service is able to connect to the client.

I'm not sure where it's directing me here. I don't use any iContextChannel for anything, all of the test-running is built in to Visual Studio. So I don't really know where/how I can increase any kind of timeout. Does anybody know where I should look?

Answer 1

Try changing the time-out values in your solution .testsettings file.

If you don't have one, you can add it to the solution by using the right-click on solution -> Add New Item -> TestSettings menu. In there you can do time-outs on individual tests (default is 30 minutes), or set the timeout for an entire test run.

It's not clear if this is the root cause or not, but it is worth ruling out.

Answer 2

Old topic, but perhaps some new info: I didn't have any luck trying to set the timeout in the .testsettings file with Visual Studio 2015. No matter what I set it to in test settings, my tests would stop after 30 minutes.

There is now a [Timeout(milliseconds)] attribute which can be applied to individual test methods. This is even better than testsettings since you can fine tune individual tests to make sure they aren't taking longer than expected.

Unfortunately, I could not get this attribute to have any effect when attempting to set it higher than 30 minutes when using a .testsettings file, even if the .testsettings file defined a higher timeout. Values lower than 30 minutes were honored, but higher values would still stop at 30 minutes regardless of what testsettings said.

After I removed the .testsettings file, the timeout attributes seem to be working as expected - the test will run up to whatever timeout I set it to.

If you have trouble getting the timeout attribute to work, try removing .testsettings.