Some informal version control timings (aka kudo's to the TFVC team)

Published 18 November 05 07:52 AM | dmckinstry

This past week I had the ability to do some performance testing on Team Foundation Version Control and a Proxy server over a corporate WAN.  I was told that our test case used to take 20-25 minutes when doing a "Get Latest" between the US-based server and the India-based workstations.  That was significantly improved to about 5 minutes when they went to SourceOffSite.  (If you don't have an option to use Team System and are trying to use VSS over a WAN, you should at least take a look at SourceOffSite.)

Now for the measurements that I actually observed... Using Visual Studio 2005 with Team Explorer, the same test case took about 2 minutes.  We added a proxy server in India and further reduced the time to ~45 seconds (after the proxy was populated).

Of course you mileage may vary, but I'm still excited to see a standard development task that apparently took 20+ minutes dropped to 45 seconds using Team System!  I'm equally impressed by how well the system performed even without the proxy!  I think this is a testament to how well the TFVC team did when architecting the system for distributed team development.

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Comments

# Eric Newton said on November 18, 2005 03:50 PM:

The 20-25 minutes is due to NetBIOS chatty traffic vs Team System's new approach using WebServices.

Basically the clients all had to do the work of managing the repository (can't believe that STILL continues to be the case with VSS), and since a WAN link is slow... yada yada yada

I'm not crazy about misleading stats... "a standard developement task that apparently took 20+ minutes dropped to 45 seconds using Team System!" Woohoo! What happened to the SourceOffSite metric?

Try not to be another loudspeaker feeding off the same audio channel... ;)

# Dave McKinstry said on November 18, 2005 06:00 PM:

Good feedback Eric. I'm not going to disagree with the architecture points and I'm not qualified to blame the original VSS performance on NetBIOS. To me this was original content because for the first time I had some first hand experience over a WAN and not just marketing. Nonetheless, it's hard for me to call it misleading when on a post of 10 sentences, two (20%) were dedicated to the great job SOS had already done.

It would be interesting to have an additional data point showing VSS 2005's performance with web services, but I'm afraid that beyond the scope of my current efforts. Cheers!

# Sanjeev said on December 1, 2005 02:18 PM:

Unfortunately the “standard development task” phrase is still quite a bit vague so I’m not sure how to proceed with it. It would be real beneficial if I could know what that test case is. Thanks!!

# Dave McKinstry said on December 1, 2005 02:54 PM:

Hi Sanjeev. The "standard development task" was a 'Get Latest Version' of a defined set of files from a version control repository in one country to a client computer in another. During the testing, the version control mechanism changed, but the two locations and trhe file sets stayed the same.

If you want to duplicate the tests, find a large set of files that you already have in VSS (or your version control system of choice), and get all the latest file versions. Then more the files into TFVC and repeat the process. If you do duplicate with your own testing, I'd love to hear the results.

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