Too much memory consumed during TFS automated build
- by Bernard Chen
We're running TFS 2010 Standard Edition, and we've set up an automated build to run whenever someone checks in code. We run through all of the automated tests (built with MSTest) as part of the build. We've configured the build to run the tests as a 64-bit process, but the QTAgent.exe that runs the tests grows in memory while the tests are running. It is currently reaching 8GB for the ~650 tests we have, and the process has slowed significantly when we went from 450 tests to 650 tests.
When we run all of the tests in the local development environment, memory seems to be freed at least with each TestClass and never exceeds a certain level. The process of running all tests has not increased significantly in the local development environment.
Is there a way to configure the build service to free up memory with each Test or each TestClass? With the way things are currently running, the build process gets very slow when we start to run out of memory on the machine.
Edit: I found the MSTest invocation in the build log and ran it manually and saw the same behavior of runaway memory. I removed the /publish, /publishbuild, /teamproject, /platform, and /flavor parameters from the invocation of MSTest, in case the test runner was holding onto results until the end, but the behavior didn't change. I ran the same command line on a dev box, separate from the build server, and the memory freed up frequently. It seems there must be something wrong/different about the build server that is causing it to behave different, but I'm stumped where to look.
I've looked at qtagent.exe.config, mstest.exe.config, versions of both executables. What else might affect this?
