I'm running an on-prem TFS instance with two agents. Agent 1 has a local path where we store our artifacts. Agent 2 has to access that path over a network path (\agent1\artifacts...).
Downloading the artifacts from agent 1 takes 20-30 seconds. Downloading the artifacts from agent 2 takes 4-5 minutes. If from agent 2 I copy the files using explorer, it takes about 20-30 seconds.
I've tried adding other agents on other machines. All of them perform equally poorly when downloading the artifacts but quick when copying manually.
Anyone else experience this or offer some ideas of what might work to fix this?
Yes It's definitely the v2 that's causing the problem.
Our download artifacts step has gone from 2mins to 36mins. Which is completely unacceptable. Im going to try out agent v2.120.2 to see if that's any better...
I think it's because of the amount of files in our artifacts, we have 3.71GB across 12,042 files in 2,604 Folders!
The other option I will look into it zipping or creating a nuget package for each public artifact and then after the drop, unzipping! Not the ideal solution but something I've done before when needing to use RoboCopy which is apparently what this version of the Agent uses.
RoboCopy is not great at handling lots of small files, and having to create a handle for each file across the network adds a lot of overhead!
Edit: The change to the newest version made no difference. We've decided to go a different route and use an Artifact type of "Server" rather than "File Share" which has sped it up from 26 minutes to 4.5 minutes.
I've found the source of my problem and it seems to be the v2 agent.
Going off of Marina's comment I tried to install a 2nd agent on 01 and it had the exact same behavior as 02. I tried to figure out what was different and then I noticed 01's agent version is 1.105.7 and the new test instance is 2.105.7. I took a stab in the dark and installed the 1.105.7 on my second server and they now have comparable artifact download times.
I appreciate your help.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44955961/vsts-agent-very-slow-to-download-artifacts-from-local-network-share