How many users will your Team Foundation Server support?
We're deep into our load testing and server sizing efforts and I thought I'd share with everyone what we are doing and how we are thinking about it.
How big of a server do I need to support my team? Should I use a "single server" or separate Application tier and Data tier configuration? If I double the size of my team, will I need to increase the capacity of my server? We'll provide high level guidelines for a mapping from team size to server configuration but if you want to understand how we do it and replicate it yourself, I'll describe it for you.
To date, we've been very conservative on our server size recommendations. Officially our recommendations are as follows (they may have changed slightly from this but they are close). I think we've blogged this before but our dogfood server configuration is 2 server - 2P 2.?Ghz 4GB AT and a 4P 2.?Ghz 16GB DT and serves about 400 people.
Approach to load testing
The first question to answer is "how much load does a "typical" user put on the system?" We've gathered this information by monitoring usage of our dogfood server for months. Of course this can vary by team based on the sizes of the projects they work on, their development methodologies and the number and type of automated tools that they have. For now we are making the assumption that, to a first approximation, the usage we see on our dogfood server is representative of what other people will see. We are currently in the process of comparing our load to what other teams at Microsoft experience to do a little more validation of that assumption. It is possible for you to collect this data for your own team and here's how...