Speed up download Artifacts in Release Management

Question

I have a project in TFS that has about 3k files as resulting of the build. What we call artifacts. It's very frequent I got the status like

No download tasks have completed in 1 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
No download tasks have completed in 2 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
No download tasks have completed in 3 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
No download tasks have completed in 4 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
No download tasks have completed in 5 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
1 downloads remaining.
No download tasks have completed in 6 minutes. Remaining task statuses:
WaitingForActivation: 1 task(s).

I've tried to compress the artifacts and download one single file. But I didn't have success on that.

Could I have a hint from the community about how to speed up the Artifacts download? Is my idea of Archive during build and unzip during release a good approach?

I've tried that but I wasn't able to download only the zip file created.

Answer 1

We have started using robocopy to download build artifacts in recent version of vsts-agent. Download performance using robocopy should be better than the performance with v1 agent as well. In case upgrading to TFS 2018 is not a viable solution, pl. get latest agent from here and configure against TFS server:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vsts-agent/releases

If you are not using TFS2018, suggest you use the latest build agent which will use robocopy should be better performance.

Another option is zipping or creating a nuget package for each public artifact and then after the drop, unzipping. You could use Archive Files task or some 3rd-party extension in marketplace. Take a look at below two related question:

• TFS build v2 agent downloads artifacts slowly, v1 unaffected
• VSTS agent very slow to download artifacts from local network share

Besides, Release Management downloads all the artifacts published by the build definition that you selected by default before. Now you are able to add a configuration option for a release definition to force agents to only download artifacts that are required for task execution. This will also speed up your release pipeline. Note: This is only available to the on-prem version in TFS 2018 Update 2.

Details please take a look at this blog: Speed up your VSTS Releases by Partially Downloading Artifacts