Data tier load with Team Foundation beta

Buck Hodges

Did you install your beta data tier in Virtual PC or Virtual Server and see a high CPU load while its running?  Even on real hardware, you may notice some load when nothing would appear to be going on.  Someone mentioned on an internal mailing list that the data tier CPU load for a combined app and data tier installed in Virtual Server was quite high, averaging about 50-70% with most of that time being used by SQL analysis services (msmdsrv.exe).

Well, here’s the answer (I didn’t write the question or the answer, but I hope people find it useful).

The warehouse was designed to run processing every hour. For demo purposes the period was changed to 2 minutes in beta 2. On a weak system or a virtual machine you will see this behavior.

Change the run interval on the app tier as follows.

  1. Stop TFSServerScheduler using ‘net stop TFSServerScheduler’.
  2. Go to http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/warehousecontroller.asmx using a browser on the app tier.  Click on ChangeSetting and enter the following values and then press the ‘Invoke’ button (3600 seconds = run once per hour).
    1. settingID: RunIntervalSeconds
    2. newValue: 3600
  3. Restart TFSServerScheduler using ‘net start TFSServerScheduler’.

Note: It is important to restart TFSServerScheduler, as the interval is cached and will not take effect until the next run.

You can also manually kick off the data warehouse.  Here are the steps to do so:

  1. Go to http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/warehousecontroller.asmx using a browser on the app tier.
  2. Click the ‘Run’ link.
  3. Press the ‘Invoke’ button.

 This will trigger a refresh of the reports.

[Update]  Thanks to Mike for pointing out the the original instructions were a little rough.  I’ve updated them.

[Update 2] Added msmdsrv.exe to the text to (hopefully) make it easier for folks to find the post when they notice that the Yukon April CTP Analysis Services process is consuming a lot of CPU time.

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