Performance with larger amount of work items

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I'm wondering about this too, do other people experience the same problem?

We are aware of performance issues with large backlogs although I don't think we can consider a backlog of 20 or so items a "large" backlog.

What kind of performance issues are you getting? Could you tell us more about your setup, your iteration/area structure, etc?

If we have a sprint backlog with 10 user stories and about 3 tasks per user story, the loading of the screen sometimes takes about 10 to 20 seconds. Not extreem long, but if you want to keep on editing it can be frustrating.

We have a team project with max 20 iterations and a total of max 100 workitems (for now). We are using one area per project, so that makes a total of 5 areas.

Hope this gives you meaningful information.

We have much larger backlogs and do not experience these kind of performance issues. Could it be due to the number of users accessing the application, or the performance of the server itself?

Can this be a problem related to IE7 ?? We see a memory use of over 300Mb and a complete hangup of the browser. What do you advise as ideal TFS server configuration?

Could be related to IE7, I'll do some testing on my side. However, IE7 is not a recommended browser. It has some known issues that could prove problematic with Urban Turtle. We're investigating but we recommend that you upgrade to a more current version, if possible.

As for system requirements, just ensure that you respect the hardware requirements for TFS2010 as documented here.

Update; the performance is significantly better when I use firefox

Agreed - IE7 performance very poor, eventually grinds to a halt. Far better with Firefox, Chrome or later IE.

Thanks for this post. i was getting quite frustrated with the performance. Using it in Chrome is at least 50% quicker. We have a backlog of around 200 PBIs shortly going to about 2000, we'll see what happens then.

I will be using Chrome from now on.

I am totally suprised at the comment from you Louis recommending us not to use IE!!! And that other browsers are better (we already know that but you should be testing IE as it is a Microsoft product - same as TFS and VS!)

This is a MICROSOFT TFS product plugin - therefore most enterprise dev shops are using IE as a standard browser - plus if its an Enterprise (like we are) you cant have your Product Owners (business people) and Business Analysts (normally who have normal network machines) loading "non-standard" browsers in to their PCs (corporate policy). So what are they supposed to do when IE is the standard browser? And it has memory leaks when the backlog is large? And it keeps crashing on them, and they get frustrated and say they want to go back to spreadsheets!!!

I have already logged a bug for IE memory leak error, and nothing has been done about it. You should be addressing this issue which is causing a lot of pain which in tern can lead companies to potentially stop using your product because of it - I ask, please address it in your next release.

To develop on a Microsoft platform - and not test thoroughly on THE Microsoft browser is just plain bad development and I would suggest this should be a standard part of your CI process to test for performance and memory leaks?

Hopefully you get my point - oh, and in your last release you broke the little drop down info indicator arrow functionality - doesnt work on any browser now.

Thanks for your feedback. I understand the frustration with regards to this particular issue. Rest assured that we are working on getting a fix ready as soon as possible but reproducing this issue is proving quite elusive.

We do test on all major browsers and we always recommend the use of the latest version of any browser, particularly because of the improvements made to their Javascript performance. We do not recommend Internet Explorer 7 as it has other issues as mentioned in this topic.

Regarding the broken arrow in version 3.13, this issue has been fixed as soon as it was first reported. I invite you to upgrade to the latest version, 3.13.1.