(See this summary on the VSTS Pioneer dogfood server and all the other posts.)

As with the last few months, October was another busy month for dogfooding TFS. Since the Pioneer server has been such a success for Work Item Tracking and Source Control, we’ve really ramped up our efforts to dogfood every single feature as much as we can. The benefits of having everything online really lets us make sure our end-to-end integration is working as well as feel the pain before we share it with our customers. The most notable changes this month are:

  • Each of the different business units within VSTS have setup their own SharePoint MOSS Dashboards with bug trends, etc.
  • We’re now using Team Build 2010 with Gated Checkin on our part of the tree (we still have to follow the divisional processes of custom nightly build scripts at this stage)
  • We enabled Test Case Management features and are now dogfooding the Test Case Management (TCM) features for our major test passes
  • We setup and enabled the Lab Management functionality on our server and we’re starting to dogfood that across the organization as well

Here’s the latest stats:

  • Recent Users: 915

Version Control

  • Version Control Users: 622
  • Files: 11,053,314
  • Compressed File Sizes: 284,480
  • Uncompressed File Sizes: 870,228
  • Checkins: 29,275
  • Shelvesets: 7,249
  • Merge History: 10,897,164
  • Pending Changes: 13,344
  • Workspaces: 1,607
  • Local Copies: 382,464,960

Work Item Tracking

  • Users with Assigned Work Items: 2,607
  • Total Work Items: 284,813
  • Areas and Iterations: 2,910
  • Work Item Versions: 2,892,664
  • Work Item Attachments: 115,501
  • Work Item Queries: 5,728

Commands (last 2 weeks in October)

  • Work Item opens:  154,788
  • Work Item queries: 120,537
  • Work Item updates: 40,242
  • Checkins: 2,630
  • Uploads: 10,440
  • Shelves: 4,553
  • Downloads: 251,032
  • Gets: 41,615

DevDiv TFS Server

On top of enabling all these new scenarios on the Pioneer server, we also managed to get the main DevDiv TFS server upgraded from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008. This was the first step to getting the server to TFS2010. I can’t say it was all smooth sailing, but it looks like we’re through the worst of it now (man, what a fortnight…).  The good news is that all of the extra performance optimizations we had to make to cope with our dataset sizes also made it into TFS2010 product.

Although no install guide will tell you, I highly recommend you put on SQL 2008 SP1 CU4 if you’re running a large, busy TFS2008 or TFS2010 server – in the processes of testing the upgrade and after the actual upgrade to SQL 2008, we hit these bugs which the SQL team quickly reacted and fixed for us: 

  • KB967178 - When you restore a SQL Server 2005 backup file in SQL Server 2008, the operation takes much longer than when you restore the same backup file in SQL Server 2005  (fixed in SQL08 SP1 CU1)
  • KB970823 - CPU cost increases suspiciously when the number of threads working on the same index increases (fixed in SQL08 SP1 CU3)
  • KB970133 - Backup Log hangs when using compressed backups and the destination drive runs out of disk space. SQL Restart is required (fixed in SQL2008 SP1 CU4) 

Now, onto the next Pioneer upgrade.