Team System Web Access 2008 Scalability Update Released

Brian Harry

While we’re talking about perf… Over the past year we’ve heard increasing complaints from customers about the scalability of the Team System Web Access Power Tool as more and more people try to use it.  The problem is usually manifested as frequent application recycles (you can see if it’s hitting you by looking in your event log).  We’ve done a bunch of work in the 2010 release (where we’ve integrated Web Access into TFS) to improve performance and scalability. Back in August, our leadership team met to make the hard call on whether to update the 2008 Web Access Power Tool or to just wait for people to upgrade to 2010 to get the fixes.  After much debate, we decided that the issues were serious enough that it was worth back porting the fixes and releasing an update – particularly since many customers will not upgrade to 2010 right away. It took a while to back port, test and customer validate the changes but, today, we released two updates (one a QFE for the TFS object model and the other a new version of the Team System Web Access Power Tool) that should significantly improve the scalability.  Most of the issues fixed had to do with memory over allocation or leaking that resulted in memory exhaustion and process recycling. You can get the updates here:

·         KB974402 – QFE for TFS Object Model Assemblies

·         TSWA 2008 – Updated TSWA 2008 SP1 Release (full install, you need to uninstall your existing TSWA 2008 instance first)

And you can read a bit more about it on Hakan’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/hakane/archive/2009/12/07/team-system-web-access-2008-sp1-scalability-update.aspx Your mileage with this will vary but to give you some context, it had gotten to the point where our heavily used dogfood server was recycling about once an hour.  With the fixes provided here, we are now seeing recycles every 29 hours (which is what the IIS app pool is set to recycle at by default) – so, in other words, pretty much no recycles due to memory consumption issues.

Brian

 

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