Speeding up merging with Coverage Validator

Coverage Validator has an option to automatically merge the coverage results of the current session with a central session. This allows you to get an automatic overview of all code coverage without having to merge the results yourself.

Some people use this, but some people prefer to record individual sessions and then merge the sessions later. This is effective but the merging stage can be slow as to merge two files you need to start Coverage Validator, load two sessions then merge them then save the result. This is known as pairwise merging. Even with the command line support for this, this is time consuming.

-mergeMultiple

To speed this up we’ve just added the -mergeMultiple command line option.

-mergeMultiple takes one argument, a filename. The file contains the list of session files to merge, one per line.

Example command line:

-mergeMultiple e:\cv_merge_multiple.txt -mergeSessions -saveMergeResult e:\cv_merge_result.cvm -hideUI

Example merge multiple file:

e:\cv_help.cvm
e:\cv_red.cvm
e:\cv_green.cvm
e:\cv_blue.cvm
e:\cv_magenta.cvm
e:\cv_cyan.cvm
e:\this_file_doesnt_exist.cvm

Files that don’t exist are not merged. They do not cause any error conditions. This is deliberate – to provide fault tolerance if an intended merge target doesn’t exist for some reason. The last thing you want is a failed merge.

Performance improvement

We’ve tested this with one of our customers that could benefit from merging multiple files in one go. The performance improvement for merging 84 files (resulting in a 3.66GB merged session file – 64 bit Coverage Validator) is a speed up 8 times (pairwise merge time was 32 minutes, with -mergeMultiple the merge time is now 4 minutes).