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TFS all builds show up as "no builds" then refresh and send all notifications again.

So it seems to be happening quite regularly (3 times in the last 15 minutes) where all builds I'm monitoring will just go blank and show up as ? "no builds" then will refresh after a minute or 2 and send me a whole lot of notifications about each of the build statuses.

TFS 2015 Win10 machine (while most of these are XAML builds, even the vNext build showed this problem) Is the app losing connection to TFS? then getting it back after refresh period to send all notifications?

I checked the %appdata%\catlight\logs\log.txt file and it showed just notifications were pushed.

3 replies

How many builds, approximately, do you monitor?

Do you have some build definition with a lot of builds in history, like hundreds or thousands? 

There is a hard limit in TFS API to return no more than 5000 build history entries for all the monitored build definitions in the project. If this limit is hit, TFS will probably return a random subset of builds, that can lead to results you see.

about 130 builds, most have no more than 5 builds. (so ~650 builds each refresh but most likely less)
is this 5000 limit being cleared with each refresh or does the buffer get full and causes a subset to be passed?
I'll try and keep an eye on the timings of these issues.

5000 build records limit is for all monitored build definitions in a specific project. It applies for each refresh attempt separately.

Maybe there is one or two build definitions with infinite retention or high build frequency that contributes to that limit. It is not feasible to try to check this by hand, so we'll add some diagnostics in upcoming versions.

Can you send us all the logs in an archive to [email protected] ? Maybe we'll see some patterns there.

As a workaround, you can try to reduce the number of build definitions that is monitored. 

This problem could happen on temporary network or server issues. We made some fixes that are available in v 1.5