The cause of TeamCity 5 slowness and CPU usage

Teamcity 5.1.2 was running like a dog for me - with skyrocketing CPU on the server.

The cause of this slowness was a slow network connection to Subversion. You see, by default Teamcity is configured to check for SVN updates every 60 seconds.

If, for some reason (like a slow network connection), it takes longer than 60 seconds to do this check, then the Teamcity svn update jobs will just keep backing up every 60 seconds until there is a whole queue of them slowing down the server.

There are a couple of things you can do:

1. Fix the cause of the network slowness
2. Change the "Default VCS changes check interval" under Administration -> Server Configuration
3. Make sure "Clean all files before build" is NOT checked in your build configuration.
4. Use the slowness as an excuse to request newer hardware :) Then do steps 1, 2 or 3.