TFS2017 build agents proxy settings

Question

After upgrading our TFS2015 ecosystem to TFS2017 RTM I noticed that the build times had increased significantly. Closer inspection revealed that the get operation times were where the additional time was coming from (40 minutes longer)

Our site is across the Atlantic to the application tier so we use a TFS Proxy server for the file downloads. I assumed initially that the TFS2015 proxy wasn't playing nice with the TFS2017 app tier so I had it reinstalled as a TFS2017 proxy and purged the file cache.

I watched the proxy file cache and statistics but observed no changes - implying that the proxy isn't being used.

Answer 1

The issue is that the TFS2017 agents don't use the same proxy settings as the TFS2015 agents. As the agents had "auto update" enabled, they became TFS2017 agents automatically shortly after the upgrade.

The TFS2015 agents read their proxy settings from: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\14.0\\TeamFoundation\\SourceControl\\Proxy

Whereas the TFS2017 agents read their proxy settings from: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\VisualStudio\\15.0\\TeamFoundation\\SourceControl\\Proxy

Putting the proxy settings into the 15.0 area resulted in the proxy's file cache repopulating and a gradual reduction in fetch times as the cache hit ratio increased.