TFS 2010 warehouse job never leaves the running state

Question

Hello StackOverFlow,

I am at my wit's end here after spending most of this week tearing my hair out and swearing at TFS so I hope someone can help :)

We have recently migrated to TFS 2010 using the MSF For Agile process template and we make use of such reports as the Burndown, User Stories progress etc. Up until 13/10/10, our warehousing worked perfectly and all our reports displayed upto date data. However, after this date, the reports started displaying old data and on looking at the status of the warehousing jobs using the GetProcessingStatus() method on the WarehouseControlWebService, we can see that the Work Item Tracking Sync job seems to be stuck in the 'Running' state.

Indeed, when you put a profiler on the database, you can see the same stored procs being called again and again, with the same parameters, as if it is stuck in a loop. While this is happening, the CPU usage is 50% and above. It stayed in this state for over 24 hours before I decided to kill it.

There is nothing particularly crazy about our setup - we did a clean TFS install and imported work items from TFS 2008 using Excel. We also have a custom work item template 'Support Ticket' which our support team use to log calls from customers. All importing was done with the proper TFS command line tools or Excel.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? I have seen a couple of posts where people have had similar issues but not seen an answer.

Thanks for your time

Dan

Answer 1

Hello again,

I am delighted to inform everyone that we managed to fix it! The issue was a rogue work item (Bug) which had a link to a Task which did not exist. I am not quite sure how this happened but can only assume it happened during our work item import from TFS 2008.

We only noticed this because, as a last resort, we were going to create a brand new Team Project Collection and Team Project, and import all our work items into it and see if the warehousing worked there. However, when we viewed the 'All Work Items' query as a tree view in Team Explorer prior to the import, one of them was highlighted in red with an exclamation next to it saying the referenced item does not exist. We simply deleted them item using 'witadmin destroywi /collection:http://tfs2010:8080/tfs/<> /id:1571' and then magically the warehousing worked again. Marvellous!

If this post helps even one person then I am a happy man as this has caused us much heartache over the past week. Although we have managed to overcome the issue, it can't be denied that Microsoft's error handling in TFS leaves a lot to be desired.

Yours

Dan