Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

Andrzej — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:57:44 GMT

It's really great - but the only thing I can't stop thinking about is: "why it was so slow in current version???".

In applications we develop in my company we often achive such big improvements and it's rather reason to shame ("why it was so slow...") than to be proud.

But internally we always are very, very, very happy :-))))))))))) Customer rather has ambivalent thoughts about it ;-)

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

bharry — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:04:48 GMT

That's the second time I've heard someone have that reaction (the other was sent to me privately) so it's probably going to be a fairly common reaction and worth me clarifying.

It’s all a matter of how you look at it. The performance of TFS V1 is exceptionally good. I’ve seen side by side comparisons with ClearCase, MKS, SourceSafe, Vault, SoftCM and others. TFS blows them away on many operations and has rough parity on virtually all. With the improvements we’ve made in Orcas I think we’ll be blowing them away on virtually everything.

You’ll notice on the benchmarks that the rows where I list # of items – the counts are very large (hundreds of thousands to over a million). Most of the improvements we’ve made in Orcas have their most profound affect when working with such large numbers of files. They’ll help everyone some but that’s where the differences get big. We learn a lot from dogfooding at the scale we do and when we are done, we will have the most scalable team development server on the planet. I expect we’ll have one more round of performance tuning in the release after Orcas but at that point we’ll be pretty much done.

Don’t be confused by the fact that we’ve made a lot of improvements. The results are already really impressive. Every customer who has done head to head perf comparisons between what they use and TFS has come away impressed. On the other hand, I'd be lieing if I told you there we're any issues when you get to millions of files. SP1 fixes the worst of them. Orcas will fix almost all of the remaining ones and then we'll continue to tune it after that.

Brian

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

bharry — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:59:25 GMT

I just got this feedback from a customer and it's related to this conversation so I thought I'd pass it on:

"Universally, TFS source control is fast. It is so fast in fact, that the first time I downloaded a project, I tried to redownload because I thought it couldn't possibly have downloaded that fast."

This is not uncommon. We get this kind of feedback all the time.

Brian

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

Andrzej — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:18:24 GMT

Belive me, I understand you totally!!!

It's a shame, but sometimes we conceal reasons of such improvements from a client because we want to avoid such reactions as mine.

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But my previuos post was not "teoretical" voice from some purist.

It comes from real expierience with TFS V1.

I belive your test plan of TFS is quite thorough but probably it doesn't consider scenario we dropped in (I don't know why. We can continue discussion privately - ask anything you need to narrow the problem).

--------------

We had about 100 users of SourceSafe. Part of that SourceSafe we have migrated to TFS-Source Control - about 100000 files with few years history, and than, after migration it was tragedy. One user taking whole project by TFS-MSSCCI Provider from Visual Studio 2003 takes our server to 100% CPU. 5 concurrent users takes our server to 400% CPU (2xXEON 2,4GHz) and very long HDD read queues: 100-600!!!

IMHO, one and only reason of such situation was stored procedure prc_Get that takes very, very long, many locking, deadlocking.

Instalation of SP1 Beta (it was only hope to change situation or go back to old, "good" SourceSafe) has broken our server because collation conflict - system tables had "Polish" collation and TFS databases - "Latin" collation and stored procedures have bug in using such scenario.

After long fight we stand up the server and now it is really faster!!! Only after SP1 performance is really good.

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I think you should consider to give people mini-hotfix (micro-hotfix?) with only prc_Get improvement instead of unstable SP1. It would be much safer to install such hotfix and relief really big pain.

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

bharry — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:26:20 GMT

I'm sorry you hit the perf problems and the problem with SP1 on a Polish collation sequence. It sounds like you have SP1 installed and working properly now and the performance is really good for you.

We certainly did make quite a few perf improvements in SP1. You are right that prc_Get is one of the most intensive operations in the system - both because it's run fairly often and because it has a very big job to do if you have a lot of files.

I'm afraid we can't separate it out as separate fix. We'll fix any issues there are with SP and get that ready for people to install and hopefully it will help others who have hit the issues you have hit.

I''ll pass on the feedback about the SP1 install problems you hit and also check if there is anything about the MSSCCI provider access pattern that may have put extra load on prc_Get.

If you could send me your email at bharry@microsoft.com, I'd be happy to follow up with you in more detail on the issues you've experienced.

Brian

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

Andrzej — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:35:55 GMT

Thank you very much for instant answer.

I must admit that current performance on our TFS SP1 server is very good.

I'm ready to help to find real reasons of our performance issues with TFS V1.

It may help other clients.

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

Carl Daniel — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 01:49:14 GMT

Awesome speed improvements! I've been using V1 since before Beta 1 and I'd have to agree with your assertion: V1 is speedy! Having V2 be even speedier is not a bad thing though!

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CyberJP — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:01:07 GMT

IS VSS dead or it will be included in Visual Studio 2008 ?

re: Orcas Version Control Performance Improvements

bharry — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:09:45 GMT

It is most certainly not dead. We continue to sell it, support it, address issues customers find, etc. It is true that we aren't implementing any big new features in Orcas for VSS – we are doing a service pack for VSS for VS 2008. Priorities change release to release so we reevaluate our resource allocations periodically. SourceSafe remains a solid solution for smaller teams that just need version control.

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