Basic Team Foundation Server 2010 Question - System Resource Usage?

Question

Guys / Gals i have a real basic Team Foundation Server 2010 question. For those of you who have played around with tfs 2010 is it a lot more light weight than tfs2008 is? I remember installing all the pieces needed for TFS 2008 one one machine at work. I remember it being a pain to install (i know 2010 is supposed to be much better) We wanted to play around with it a little bit to see if it met our needs. Well it brought that machine to a screeching halt. I'm needing a source control repository for home and i thought why not just install tfs 2010 so i can get familiar with it and maybe in the future i can make a better sell to my organization and FINALLY get them to move off of Source Safe but my concern is i only have one server at home (granted i already have SQL Server installed) and don't want to buy a machine just for this purpose. I'd also like to get more familiar with CI too.

Anyways, if team is going to be to heavy i'll just use subversion but i'd like to use TFS if possible. Any help would be appreciated.

thanks,

Ncage

Answer 1

In testing here, TFS 2010 uses about the same resource-wise as TFS 2008 did, doing what 2008 did. Keep in mind that there's tons of new functionality in TFS 2010 and it'll use more resources overall simply because you're using it more (only if you use those features, of course).

It's a hard question to answer compared to VSS because it depends what you do.

• Are you going to use it for testing?
• Will you track all your bugs, enhancements, other work items in it?
• Will you use the build serves, on a different machine or the same?
• Size of code base, number of projects, connections, etc...

There are lots of factors that make each install and it's resource usage vary widely. If you're looking at it from changing TFS 2008 to TFS 2010 strictly for source control then I've seen little difference in server performance and CPU, though disk activity went way down on the SQL box, I believe they made some major improvements to the database structure.

All that being said, it's not a beast. For a few thousand on a server and a good backup strategy, your TFS server will handle over a hundred developers with 1-10 check-ins a day no sweat. Remember that if you have MSDN subscriptions, each one includes a TFS Server License and CAL.

As for your home server, as long as it's a decent machine, it should run it no problem. I had a test machine here for under $600, 2 Drives, quad core, 4GB running Server 2008 R2 and TFS 2010 (latest beta)...it barely touched the CPU/disk except when doing a build.

Answer 2

Purely from a memory standpoint, it seems like anything under 2GB will not cut it if you run the full setup on a single box.

Nick pointed out 4GB and that is what I would say you definitely need if you run all features on the same box.

I just dealt with this last Thursday on a corporate HyperV Win 2008 R2 image and with the memory dialed to 2GB (stock config at my company unless more is requested), it was really struggling. I requested a bump to 4GB, rebooted, and it seems much better. Probably sticks around 60% memory usage now.

Good answer by Nick, though.