December '07 DevDiv Dogfood Statistics

The massive spike that I’ve been foreboding for a long while now has started. In the last month the momentum towards moving the entire division over to TFS has really picked up. A significant fraction of the branches for the development of the next version of Visual Studio/.NET Framework have been created. Overall, I expect this ramp up phase will last another 2-3 months – right now a lot of planning is happening; development is slowly ramping up.

Demonstrating this change, you can see an increase of over 32 million in the number of files and 154 million in number of local copies.

Just this week, we are doing training for all of the people in the division who have not yet started using TFS. I expect the number of recent users will grow every month for the next few months.

Other preparations continue as well. One of our biggest challenges has been getting the central build lab moved over – both due to the number of tools/scripts and due to the load they put on the system. Right now we’re working on getting their nightly sync times down so that builds complete in a reasonable amount of time.

We’ve also been struggling with some out of memory problems on the server. I don’t think we thoroughly understand the problem yet. However, we’ve learned a few things. The version control file cache on the server has gotten to 5 million files and the algorithm to manage it has gotten to be slow and very memory intensive. I think we are going to need to move to an algorithm does not require scanning the file system for age to manage the cache size.

Overall, it still seems to be going reasonably well. Here are the chart and detailed statistics…