Background Job Service Agent causing CPU at 100%

Question

We are running TFS 2010 with SP1 on a Windows Server 2008 machine, the app tier is running on a different Win2K8 server, all of this is virtualized. If it matters, earlier this year we moved our TFS implementation to new hardware (I installed new, detached old collection and migrated it to the new one).  Lately, every day or 2, our TFS data tier CPU utilization hits 100%.  Up until now we’ve been restarting the database server and that would clear it up, but today, after a small bit of investigation we found:

• It was something connecting to tfs_configuration that took up a billion seconds of cpu time
• Went to “TFS” and did iisreset – no change
• Went to “TFS” and restarted the background job service agent

 That cleared up the resource contention.

 This screenshot is *after* I cleaned things up.  Any good ideas on how to troubleshoot what our culprit is here on our server?

 

We are about to run the BPA tool, and I've been scouring MSDN but haven't found much yet, but I'm also not entirely sure what to search on.  If I find something before we see an answer I'll post it here.

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Angela Dugan

Answer 1

Hi Angele, 

Thanks for your post.

Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent folder, edit the TfsJobAgent.exe.config file to enable the <listeners> to get the jobagent.log, then analysis this log file, check if can find something relate to this issue. 

     <listeners>

        <add name="myListener"

          type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener"

          initializeData="C:\Replace_Me_With_A_Directory_The_Service_Account_Can_Write_To\jobagent.log" />

        <remove name="Default" />

      </listeners>

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John Qiao [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

I was having the exact same issue here.  I did set up the logs, my database server right now is pinned at 100% CPU utilization from this same process.  Here's what's in the logs currently.  I"m thinking there must be something else we can add to figure out what's exactly going on here?

Thanks,

TFSJobAgent: OnStart entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString exit.
TFSJobAgent: OnStart exit.
TFSJobAgent: OnStart entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString exit.
TFSJobAgent: OnStart exit.
TFSJobAgent: OnStart entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString entry.
TFSJobAgent: GetApplicationDbConnectionString exit.
TFSJobAgent: OnStart exit.