cruisecontrol sourcesafe block

Question

The build machine at work has many projects, but we are only experiencing a problem with one.

Two projects are very similar, one builds in debug mode, the other in release mode. They both clear out the projects directory, and then does a full Get from source safe. The debug build gets the source fine and fairly quickly, but the release build takes ages to get the source (It pauses for a long time on the CheckingModifications part, whereas the debug build does not pause for nearly as long). The sourcecontrol blocks are identical (included from a single file), and are as follows:

<sourcecontrol type="vss" autoGetSource="true" applyLabel="false">
    <executable>C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VSS\win32\SS.EXE</executable>
    <project>$/Projects</project>
    <username>####</username>
    <password>####</password>
    <ssdir>\\####\SourceCode\VSS</ssdir>
    <workingDirectory>D:\Projects\</workingDirectory>
    <culture>en-GB</culture>
    <cleanCopy>True</cleanCopy>
</sourcecontrol>

Any one have any ideas on why the release builds source control block is slower?

Answer 1

Are the Debug and Release builds running at the same time? If so, I could see one waiting for the other to finish.

Answer 2

In the end we have switched from SourceSafe to SourceGear Vault (mainly for branching features, but speed and reliability were also large factors).

We have also moved our build machine from an old pc to a server which has a 1Gb/s connection to the source server, rather than 100Mb/s, which has helped considerably.

In the end when I was installing and testing Vault on the same machine (well, a clone) as the old build machine, it was cutting the source get operation from around 10 mins to 5. Once it was installed on the build server source get time is now around 1min.

My advice to anyone is just to switch from SourceSafe to anything else...you wont regret it.