TFS 2010 Status Reports

As a TFS administrator, knowing what’s going on inside your server is crucial. The TFS Administration Console is your first help in monitoring the server status. However, it doesn’t show you anything about the queued & executing jobs.

Luckily for us, the TFS team released two reports to give a better insight as to what is happening on the server. To get all the details go to Grant Holliday’s blog and follow his instructions.

After installation you got 2 reports:

Warehouse Status Report

The first part of the report shows you the overall status, similar to the ‘Reporting’ tab in the Team Foundation Administration Console. This is a quick an easy way to find out if an Incremental or Full processing is in progress. It will also show you any errors (like warehouse schema conflicts) in the ‘Last Run’ column.

The second part of this report is useful after an upgrade or when the warehouse needs to be rebuilt manually. It shows you each of the data adapter sync jobs for each collection and their current status. During normal operation, these will run very quickly as data changes in the operational stores, so you’ll probably always see them as “Idle”. It will also show you any errors from previous job executions in the ‘Last Run’ column.

Job Status Report

The first part of this report shows you the job definitions for the instance and the interval they’re set to run on. This is useful for checking to see if a job has somehow been disabled or changed.

The second part of this report shows you the job history.

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

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