Will TFS performance be degraded by having too many user workspaces?
Our IT group observed that development has many workspaces leftover from users who have moved on, and would like development to clean them up. We currently have about 30 active users in TFS. There are probably 10 inactive users with workspaces.
I didn't think workspaces consumed much space in TFS. Will deleting these old workspaces really improve performance that much?
Slightly, because underneath the covers everything is simply being stored in SQL Server however the performance impact of having orphaned workspaces should be minimal especially with just under 50 users.
You should establish as part of deprovisioning a contractor/employee a standard way to ensure that code is checked in, tasks are reassigned and workspaces are cleaned up to keep things sensible.
Given the volume that you're talking about, I would say that your gains will be insignificant. We currently have almost 800 workspaces (a number of which are inactive), and our performance is acceptable.
When you look at the statistics from Microsoft you will see that the volume your are talking about is really peanuts and can be handled easily: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2009/07/13/july-09-devdiv-dogfood-statistics.aspx
When you want to clean up your workspaces, consider using the Sidekicks tool of Attrice: http://www.attrice.info/cm/tfs/. There is a workspace sidekick which shows you all the workspaces. You can select the workspace on last access date (http://www.attrice.info/images/workspace_sk_screen.gif) - for example all workspaces not accessed last 3 months - and then delete those.
