Windows notes

2 minute read

Installing CloudBees Build Acceleration might unset the environment variable JAVA_HOME. Reset JAVA_HOME manually.

Under high-volume network traffic, the non-paged pool memory in the Windows kernel can become depleted. This issue in the Windows kernel can be triggered by applications such as MySQL and Java server applications. Over time, this causes a system crash.

The workaround is to use the 64-bit version of Windows. Although this does not completely resolve the issue, it increases the available memory to make crashes less likely and less frequent.

The FileInfo and Superfetch services run on Windows 7 (Microsoft officially turned them off as of Windows Server 2008 R2).

Because the FileInfo (used by Superfetch) filter driver issues a couple of calls for each file operation in the EFS driver, it can slow down the EFS driver.

CloudBees Build Acceleration turns off the two services by default. You can leave them running by removing the following two lines from the runagent file (located in <ECloud install>\<arch>\bin ):

catch {service stop sysmain} catch {service stop fileinfo}

and rebooting the machine.

Real-time scans can slow down builds and can cause unexpected failures because of issues with the antivirus software’s DLL injection. Generally, scans do not find anything relevant, because all results are also checked on the eMake machine.

Certain processes might continue to run on Windows agent machines. You can terminate all “stale” processes by adding the following line to the runagent.local file (located in <ECloud install>\<arch>\bin):

[efs connect] set terminateStaleProcess 1

If the runagent.local file does not yet exist, then create it. This file uses Tcl script syntax.

Building managed code or .NET code has no known limitations. There are, however, areas to keep in mind:

  • Agents must have the same version of .NET installed.

  • Agents must be on the same service pack level and have the same operating system and tool hotfixes installed.

  • The language bar must be enabled on all agent machines or disabled on all agent machines.

  • Including the Global Assembly Cache in the eMake root is not recommended. Contact CloudBees technical support for details. For assistance, go to the CloudBees technical support site at https://support.cloudbees.com/ and submit a support request.