Team Foundation Server 2018 very slow in processing requests

Question

We're having troubles with the speed our on premise Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 2 installation. It's a new installation on a standalone PC with latest Windows 10 installed. One build agent running on the same PC, a deployment agent running on a different domain with PAT authentication. Its running in HTTPS mode with a self signed certificate, anonymous authentication is enabled.

The issue is that nearly all requests to the server like pushing GIT commits, Web Access, Deployments and Builds are very slow. The IIS log shows that nearly all requests take about 50 seconds and most return HTTP status code 202.

CPU usage (max 13%) and memory usage (max 48%) does not look like being an issue.

Event log shows some warnings but seem to be unrelated the performance / speed of TFS. Any ideas on how to get the root of this issue?

Answer 1

Windows 10

If it's running on Windows 10, the default IIS settings will probably be horribly bad for team usage. IIS is limited in the number of parallel requests on Windows 10, the apppools shut down by default etc. Plus, SQL Server is limited as well in similar ways. Similar limits are in place around max memory usage for SQL.

I wouldn't be surprised if simply moving the installation to a Windows Server 2016 box with similar specs would be a lot faster.

Anti-virus

This being a desktop PC, is there a custom firewall/anti-virus installed, it may be causing interesting slowdowns as well.

AD server

In order to authenticate users connecting, IIS will try to contact the AD server, if your box is far away digitally speaking, those requests may take a long time, but would be mostly invisible from outside inspection.

Too much on a single machine

Running SQL, App Tier and Build agents on the same box is a pretty excessive setup unless the machine has multiple disks, preferably SSDs, enough memory etc.

With the information you've provided it hard to provide any additional information.