I'm not that familiar with Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server, but I have a development team that are complaining of very slow check ins (several minutes) in Visual Studio 2010.
Examination of server and database do not reveal any problems
The issue only happens in one particular solution.
The issue can occur even for very small text files.
The issue effects all users in the team.
Where should I start troubleshooting?
edit Extra Information
The size of the project is ~11.5GB, made up of 284,455 files and 52,186 folders. These are accessed by ~10 users. I think that, in terms of size, it is the largest project we have.
I'm not exactly certain when the problem first manifested.
I have tired to reproduce the issue on my machine without success. So it looks like something to do with the local setup. I've installed the plugins and extensions that the dev team is using.
The same developers don't have a problem with other projects.
For anyone experiencing large lag times when doing anything requiring TFS interaction (check out, check in, add new, rename, move, anything), there are probably many areas within TFS that could be causing the problem. In my case, even the simplest TFS interaction within Visual Studio involved a 5-10 second wait. I decided to investigate it using Process Monitor, and discovered that every time TFS did anything, it would iterate over every single file in my TFS workspace, regardless of what projects were open, or whether Source Control Explorer or Team Explorer was open. At the time, like #reticentKoala, I had 100,000+ files totalling over 17GB in my workspace.
This is definitely a bug in the TFS client code (I'm running VS2013 and our IT people upgraded to whatever its associated TFS version is), but thankfully it reveals some workarounds.
In my case, I do work on numerous projects, but generally only one or two at a time. By creating an 'Archive' folder in my normal work folder, and moving any projects I'm not actively working on into it, I was able to get TFS interacting at reasonable speeds again.
If you are actively involved in a much larger project that you can't move pieces of around willy-nilly like that, I can only speculate on possible solutions, but the basic idea would be to just reduce either the number of files in your active workspace, or their presence on your local machine.
Have you checked the following post, in particular comment from Joel Rondeau:
Suggestions for troubleshooting slow TFS server
or:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161104172214/http://www.lostapalooza.com/?p=150
I would ensure no large BLOB files are actually stored in the TFS system as well. Store links to them instead, and use the web access and team sites to do this.
Related
We're working with a solution which has multiple projects which references NuGet packages from other solutions.
Every time we do get latest from the TFS server on the solution, Visual Studio (2015) starts reloading each project in the solution which takes a really long time. Now this wasn't always the case, since this started happening only a few weeks back (the solution is a year old).
We have other solutions which were already experiencing this problem and our solution is to close the solution, then do get latest, then reload the project which is much, much faster.
Can anybody explain why this is happening and how to fix this issue?
This has been reported as a bug to MSFT, see Slow project reloading & Reload of projects is slow after call to TFS to get latest changeset. It seems your project files are updated from outside VS, which causes VS to load all them. More details please see the reply from VS IDE team:
Main culprit is, your project files are being updated from outside
VS, which causes VS to load each of them one by one. This is
extremely taxing process and it happens on the main UI thread. Hence,
this ASL logic is on-by-default to alleviate unresponsive solution
loads. Essentially, you’re pointing out a limitation in our ASL logic
that we hadn’t considered. This will be considered for a future
release, thank you.
In the meantime, one way to mitigate the problem would be to force
solution reload by touching the solution file, the *.sln file, which
will trigger ASL to kick in, basically VS thinking you’re doing full
solution load and it will optimize responsiveness time as much as
possible.
Ulzii Luvsanbat
Visual Studio IDE Team
Please try these steps:
Open Visual Studio installer and install the most recent available update for 2017 version.
Open %localappdata%/Microsoft/Team Foundation/7.0/cache and delete all files, then restart Visual Studio and retry.
I am using VS 2013 ultimate, working on a project with Team Foundation Server. The problem is, every ten seconds, it hangs for up to 5 seconds, I am not compiling or anything, just writing code. Devenv.exe process jumps to more than 25% CPU and 670k of RAM. I have looked at the output from the JavaScript Language Service, and it constantly checks and says Referenced file 'D:\tfs\xxx.aspx' not found. Text search of the filename xxx.aspx in entire solution turns up nothing and I have the latest version. I think this is the reason of the spikes, does anyone know how I can turn off this feature in VS 2013?
EDIT: I have looked at other solutions, Browser Link is closed, I have the latest update
EDIT: I have found the solution, but I dont think it will really help anyone else. One of the guys referenced a hard drive path on top of a javascript page, and since the project is tens of thousands lines, cpu spiked as Visual Studio was searching it. Deleting the references helped in my case.
To narrow down this issue:
Try to disconnect from TFS server. (In VS→ Team → Disconnect from
Team Foundation Server) Check whether this abnormal phenomena still exist.
Use devenv/resetuserdata command to clear user settings of VS,
details refer to this blog: VSTS Tip: devenv /resetuserdata
If you are using proxy in your machine, try to disable the proxy
settings.
If there is anti-virus in the machine, also try to disable it.
Ok, before I explain in detail, here's my (very odd) setup:
Hardware: iMac
OS: Mountain Lion
Software:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010
Source Control (Windows): Team Foundation Server
So here's my dilemma.
I looooove Sublime 2. However, being a Microsoft shop at my workplace, I have no choice but to deal with TFS. I don't do a lot of back-end coding, I'm a front-end guy and don't need all the hefty class and structure tracking built into Visual Studio, so Sublime is perfect for me.
One of the things I love about Sublime is that I can hit cmd+p and pull up any file immediately. The alternative is spending several minutes sifting through our file structure to locate the same file (we have a massive project structure...it's a beast).
Unfortunately, I can't just tap cmd+p and pull up any file...I can...but after editing it, I hit save and "uh oh! file isn't checked out, it's read only". I then have to switch spaces, spend several minutes sifting through directories to locate that same file I worked on, and check it out. Switch back, save, and then check it in. It wastes a lot of my time and defeats the time-saving benefits of Sublime's file searching.
What I'd like to know is if there's an easier way to accomplish this. I've tried a few things and none have panned out. I found a plugin that integrates TFS with Sublime - but that only works for Windows. I tried using Eclipse with a TFS plugin, but I still have to browse through a massive directory structure to check out the file in Eclipse before editing it in Sublime.
Is there any way to streamline this process better? I know it might sound silly to go through such extremes to save a minute or two here & there, but when I do this hundreds of times a day, it starts to save a LOT of time!
Thanks in advance to the community for any help on this!
If you can persuade your TFS Admin team to upgrade to TFS 2012 you will have your solution. TFS 2012 supports "Local Workspace" which does not keep files read-only on disk. You download your source code once through Visual Studio or Eclipse and keep working in ANY editor you want. TFS Client tracks changes on the file system and you just need VS or Eclipse to check-in your work at the end of the day.
For TFS 2008 and 2010 you have to check-out your files manually or with the help of a supported IDE. Those versions only support "server workspace"s and that flavour of workspace keeps all files on disk as read-only.
You might have another chance with 2008 or 2010 tough. TFS 2008 and TFS 2010 on Windows platform supports offline working, which temporarily disconnects your workspace from the server to do your work. Then at the end of the day you go back online and TFS client tries to "detect" what changes were made when you were offline and lets you check them in. This blog post says Team Explorer Everywhere supports offline work. You might need to remove read-only flags of files manually. Offline working is not perfect even on Windows platform and you need to be careful until you get used to it but I believe it is worth giving a shot.
If upgrading to TFS 2012 is an option then you probably want to consider it.
TFS2012 with local workspaces no longer require files to be checked out in visual studio first (files are no longer marked as readonly, and vs detects changes from other programs). This will get rid of one of your alt-tabs to windows.
You'd still have to alt-tab back to check in, you could potentially use a commandline "tf checkin" if you don't want to keep visual studio open.
So after trying several suggestions from here, among a few I found elsewhere, I've come to the conclusion that the best setup (for me) is as follows:
Editor (Mac): Sublime 2
Editor (PC): Sublime 2 with TFS plugin
Virtualization: Parallels Running Windows Server 2008
IDE (Windows): Visual Studio 2010 Source Control
(Windows): Team Foundation Server
So as you can see I updated my existing setup with one slight tweak. On my Windows side, I installed Sublime 2 and installed the TFS plugin. If I want to check out a file, I switch to windows, search for the file, check it out via Sublime's TFS plugin, then switch back to the Mac. It's certainly not ideal, and requires an extra step, but it seems to work the best for me and is faster than using Visual Studio to check in/out.
If anyone comes up with a more elegant setup (aside from using TFS 2012 - which thankfully is coming for my organization), I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, I hope this helps anyone else who might be using a setup similar to mine.
I'm experiencing some performance problems. When I edit a file, Visual Studio 2008 performs a background (on-the-fly) compilation and then, it updates the error list. During this time, the cursor in the file editor disappears, and the keys I press to move or type more character are buffered.
Once the background compilation is finished, the changes are reflected in the editor (1 - 2 seconds). Every time I edit a file, which happens often, this happens.
How can I fix this problem? If this is not possible, can I disable this automatic build?
I had an odd performance-related issue today. My Microsoft Visual Studio seemed to be taking far too long to perform even the simplest of operations. I Googled around and tried a few ideas that people had such as disabling add-ins or clearing Visual Studio’s recent projects list but those suggestions didn’t seem to solve the problem. I remembered that the Windows SysInternals website had a tool called Process Monitor that would sniff registry and file accesses by any running program.
It seemed to me that Visual Studio was up to something and Process Monitor should help me figure out what it was. I downloaded the most recent version, and after fiddling around a bit with its display filters, ran it and to my horror, I saw that Visual Studio was so slow because it was accessing the more than 10,000 folders in C:\Users\krintoul\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebSiteCache on most IDE operations. I’m not sure why there were that many folders and moreover, wasn’t sure what Visual Studio was doing with them, but after I zipped those folders up and moved them somewhere else, Visual Studio’s performance improved tremendously.
The Windows SysInternals website has a number of other useful utilities for network management, security, system information and more. Check it out. I’m sure you’ll find something of value.
I am developing an Isolated Shell that caters to "designers/special content creators" performing specific tasks, using the Shell. As they operate on files, they need to be able to use TFS for source control. This is mainly due to the fact that Developers will also operate on the same files from TFS but using Visual studio 2008.
After looking and searching I still could not find Team Explorer to be available to Shell.
Asking on MSDN forums, lead me to the answer that "this is not supported yet in the Isolated Shell". Well, then the whole point of giving away a shell is not justified, if you want to use a source control system for your files. The idea is not to recreate everything and develop tool windows etc using the TFS provider API.
The Visual Studio Extensibility book by Keyven Nayyeri has an example, which only goes so far into this problem of adding a sc provider.
Has anyone worked on developing Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell applications/environment? Please provide comments, questions - anything that you have to share apart from the following threads, which I've already participated in.
Threads from MSDN forums:
Team Explorer for Isolated Shell
Is it possible to use Team Explorer in VS Shell Isolated?
Thanks for your answer. Yes you are right, we will acquire CALs for users without having to buy them Visual Studio, that's the direction we will be taking.
But I am yet to figure out how to make Team Explorer available to such users, inside Shell. So I am looking to find out the technical details of how that can be done.
I mean, I have a user, he installs my VS Shell application, he has no VStudio Team system on his machine. Now if I acquire CAL for TFS and install Team Explorer, do you think it will be automatically available in the VS Shell app?
Any ideas? have you worked on making this happen?
Thanks
It sounds like you are trying to allow the "special content creators" save files in TFS Source Control without having to buy them a license to a Visual Studio Team Edition -- correct me if I'm wrong.
If that's the case, unfortunately I believe that you can't quite do that. Your users still need a Client Access License ("CAL") to access TFS.
I think that you can acquire just CALs for your users without having to buy Visual Studio for them (I presume for less than a full blown Visual Studio would cost). At that point, you can just distribute to them the Team Explorer, which is a VS shell with nothing but TFS access components. That is available in your TFS server media.
I found this via Google. You might want to review it to decide your best options:
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper
The only exception to the CAL rules I'm aware of is access to Work Items. Assuming properly licensed servers, anyone in your organization can create new Work Items or view and update existing ones created by them, using the Work Item Web Access component.
Just stumbled on this question, it might still be relevant to you.
You have the option of including the AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) packages and load it into your Isolated Shell. While there are some issues around it, with Subversion support, you could use SvnBridge to access TFS repositories. This might bring you a little bit closer to the process you are trying to achieve.