Teamcity build queue coalescing

Question

We're using TeamCity 9.0.4. Our full builds take over three hours. While a build is in progress if new commits come in they get queued with, apparently, a VCS snapshot from the time they were queued (I can't see that behaviour specified anywhere, but it's what I've observed).

So by the time the next build is dequeued there may be many builds queued up as developers have been committing changes. The intermediate builds are usually not useful at this point - we just want it to skip straight to the latest build for that configuration.

Other build systems I've used only queue one additional build per configuration and takes its VCS snapshot at the point it is dequeued. This has the effect we want. I can't work out how to achieve this with TeamCity. What am I missing?

Answer 1

According to our documentation, TeamCity should perform the following build queue optimizations: https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/TCD9/Build+Queue#BuildQueue-BuildQueueOptimizationbyTeamCity

If it does not work for you, I'd recommend upgrading your server to the most recent version first, and if it does not help, create an issue in our tracker with details about these builds.

Answer 2

I think you've specified this in your trigger.

Edit Configuration Settings | Triggers | VCS Trigger | Show advanced options | Trigger a build on each check-in

That option should be unchecked. The wording is a little confusing I guess. Even with this unchecked, each VCS commit will queue a build but it won't force them to be built in isolation.