TeamCity Cloud 2021.1 Help

Known Issues

This page contains a list of workarounds for known issues in TeamCity.

Agent running as Windows Service Limitations

When a TeamCity build agent is installed as a Windows service, there may appear various "Permission denied" or "Access denied" errors during the build process, see details below.

Windows service limitations

As a Windows service, the TeamCity agent and the build processes are not able to access network shares and mapped drives.

To overcome these restrictions, run TeamCity agent via console.

Issues with automated GUI and browser testing

These problems include errors running tests headless, issues with the interaction of the TeamCity agent with the Windows desktop, and so on.

To resolve / avoid these:

  1. Run TeamCity agent via console.

  2. Configure the build agent machine not to launch a screensaver locking the desktop.

  3. Configure the TeamCity agent to start automatically (for example, configure an automatic user logon on Windows start and then configure the TeamCity agent start (via agent.bat start) on the user logon).

For graphical tests the build agent cannot be started as a service and it is recommended to configure the build agent launch with a 1 minute delay after the user auto-logon, e.g. using the bin\agent.bat start command in the task scheduler and configuring the delay there.

Running automated GUI tests and using RDP

RDP uses its own video driver overriding the one from the machine's video card for the session. Redirecting the session to console will unload the Windows graphical drivers. This can be done by adding the following step to your build configuration prior to your tests (the example below is for PowerShell, but other languages (DOS, Python) can be used too):

$sessionInfo=((quser $env:USERNAME | select -Skip 1) -split '\s+') if ($sessionInfo[1] -like "rdp-tcp*") { tscon $sessionInfo[2] /dest:console }

where quser [current username] lists all the connections to that machine for the user, either console or graphical.
The one listed as rdp-tcp#* is the remote desktop connection which can be redirected to the console using tscon [connection id] /dest:console.

Issues with .NET Selenium

When a TeamCity agent is started as a Windows service and automated tests for .NET applications use Selenium WebDriver, the tests may fail due to browser drivers limitations. As a solution, consider starting the agent manually.

Early start of the service before other resources are initialized

To handle this, consider using the Automatic (Delayed Start) option of the service settings or configure service dependencies.

For more investigation steps, see the Common Problems page.

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread error

If your TeamCity server is running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise (or using systemd Daemon), the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: unable to create new native thread error may be caused by the cgroup process number controller feature limiting the number of processes and the amount of threads in a cgroup to 512 by default.

Increasing the limit (e.g. to 4096) on the TeamCity server should solve the issue.

See also this external posting.

Clearing Browser Caсhes

There is a web UI-related issue which some users have encountered (and it cannot be reproduced on other computers) which is tied to the cached versions of content. If you have come across such problem, make sure your browser does not use cached versions of content by clearing browser caches.

Logging with Log4j in Your Tests

If you use Log4j logging in your tests, in some cases you may miss the Log4j output from your logs. In such cases do the following:

  • Use Log4j 1.2.12

  • For Log4j 1.2.13+, add the Follow=true parameter for the console appender used in Log4j configuration:

    <appender name="CONSOLE" class="org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender"> <param name="Follow" value="true"/> </appender>

Agent Service Can Exit on User Logout under Windows x64

The used version of Java Service Wrapper does not fully support Windows 64 and this causes agent launcher process to be killed on user logout. The agent itself will be function until the next restart (server upgrade or agent properties change).

Failed Build Can be Reported as a Successful One With Maven 2.0.7

This is a known bug in this version of Maven. Consider using any later version.
In case it's not possible, you can patch mvn.bat yourself by replacing the fragment at line 148 of mvn.bat:

:error set ERROR_CODE=1

with the following one:

:error if "%OS%"=="Windows_NT" @endlocal set ERROR_CODE=1

Conflicting Software

Most common indicators of conflicting software are errors like "Access is denied", "Permission denied" or java.io.FileNotFoundException mentioning the file that is present and is writable by the user the agent/build runs under. Also, certain software running in the background (like antivirus) can significantly slow down such build agent operations as sources checkout, artifact publishing or even build running.

Certain antivirus software like Kaspersky Internet Security can result in Java process crashes or other misbehavior like inability to access files. For example, see this issue.

ESET antivirus can also slow down Ant/IntelliJ IDEA project builds a great deal (slowing down TCP connections to localhost on an agent).

If you run antivirus on the TeamCity agent machines and get disk access errors or experience degraded performance, you may consider temporarily disabling the antivirus software before investigating the issue and reporting it to JetBrains. Note that disabling the antivirus can make your setup more vulnerable to potential external attacks — ensure you take proper security measures before doing this.

There might be problems with the Windows Indexing Service, so disable various indexing services. See the related issue for more details. Windows System Restore Feature might also need disabling.

Do not install software with background indexing like WinCVS, TortoiseCVS, TortoiseSVN, and other Tortoise* products. This applies to server and also to agents if you use agent-side checkout.

Skype software is known to corrupt layout of pages displayed in Internet Explorer. (TW-13052).

Subversion issues

Subversion-related JVM Crashes

If JVM crashes while executing SVN-related code (e.g. under org.tmatesoft.svn package), you can try to disable it using one of the options:

  • Passing -Dsvnkit.useJNA=false JVM option to the crashing process (server or agent)

  • Making NTLM support less prioritative by passing the -Dsvnkit.http.methods=Basic,Digest,NTLM JVM option.
    Anyway, upgrading the JVM used to the latest available version is recommended.

Perforce 2009.2 Performance on Windows

If you run Perforce 2009.2 on Windows you may experience significant slow down. This is an issue with P4 server running on Windows. Refer to corresponding section in Perforce documentation.

Upgrading IntelliJ IDEA May Affect Active Pre-Tested Commits

Before you upgrade to IntelliJ IDEA X (or other IntelliJ X platform products), make sure you do not have active pre-tested commits, otherwise they will not be able to be committed after upgrade. This is only relevant if you use directory-based IDEA project (project files are stored under .idea directory).

Failure to publish artifacts to server behind IIS reverse proxy

This problem is only relevant to configurations that involve an IIS reverse proxy between the build server and agents. Sometimes a build agent can be found in infinite loop trying to publish build artifacts to the server. The build log looks like this:

[11:15:05]Publishing artifacts [11:15:05][Publishing artifacts] Collecting files to publish: [toZip/** => artifact.zip] [11:15:06][Publishing artifacts] Creating archive artifact.zip (9s) [11:15:06][Creating archive artifact.zip] Creating C:\BuildAgent\temp\buildTmp\ZipPreprocessor2847146024236637664\artifact.zip [11:15:15][Creating archive artifact.zip] Archive was created, file size 32142324 bytes [11:15:15][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/** [11:15:25][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/** [11:15:39][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/** [11:15:48][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/** [11:16:01][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/** [11:16:16][Publishing artifacts] Sending toZip/**

meanwhile, teamcity-agent.log is filled with 404 responses from IIS:

[2012-08-01 12:04:55,514] WARN - jetbrains.buildServer.AGENT - <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <title>404 - File or directory not found.</title> <style type="text/css"> <!-- body{margin:0;font-size:.7em;font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;background:#EEEEEE;} fieldset{padding:0 15px 10px 15px;}

The most common cause for this is maxAllowedContentLength setting (in IIS) is either

  • set to too small value, or

  • left unconfigured and so defaults to 30000000 bytes (<30 Mb)

So any artifact larger than maxAllowedContentLength is discarded by IISCheck the settings value and try to rerun your build

Distorted Configuration Window During Agent Reinstallation

When installing a TeamCity agent via a Windows agent installer on top of the already installed agent with a different version of Java, the "Configure Build Agent Properties" installation window might appear distorted.

This issue has been fixed in TeamCity 2019.1.5.

To workaround this issue without upgrading to 2019.1.5, uninstall the previously installed agent version before installing a new agent into the same directory.
To uninstall the agent, invoke Uninstall.exe in the Agent Home Directory, clear all the "Remove..." checkboxes to keep the agent logs and configuration, and click Uninstall. After the successful uninstallation, you can proceed with installing the new agent version via the agent installer.

dotCover known issues

dotCover does not support Windows Nano Server

If you try to run dotCover on an agent with the Nano Server OS, the build will fail with an exit error "Process exited with code -1073741515". Instead of Nano Server, consider using Server Core which is an alternative minimal installation option of Windows Server.

dotCover does not support сoverage statistics for msbuild

dotCover does not support collection of coverage statistics for the dotnet msbuild /t:vstest command — use dotnet test instead.

Xcode 10 is unable to clean artifacts in custom output directory

If you use a custom output directory for Xcode, note that on upgrading to Xcode 10, TeamCity builds with the Xcode Project build runner might fail with the error: "Could not delete <directory> because it was not created by the build system and it is not a subfolder of derived data."

This is caused by the following Xcode 10 known issue:
When performing xcodebuild clean on a project that uses a customized build location outside the derived data directory, and that has older build products produced prior to Xcode 10, Xcode might report an error indicating that it won't delete directories not created by the new build system. (40427159)
See Xcode documentation for details.

To resolve this issue, we suggest that you use Xcode 11 instead. To workaround this issue in Xcode 10, you can either clean the output directory manually or try using the previous build system by passing -UseNewBuildSystem=NO to command line parameters.

.NET runner known issues

Cannot create an instance of the logger when using early Visual Studio 2017 build

In rare cases, if an early build of Visual Studio 2017 is installed on your build agent, you might get the "Cannot create an instance of the logger" error when running the .NET build step. This might be caused by the logger's incompatibility with the framework version being used.

To workaround this problem, you can upgrade Visual Studio 2017 to the latest build or, alternatively, install any later version of .NET Framework.

NuGet known issues

Prerelease packages are not visible in the TeamCity NuGet feed

Problem: Prerelease packages are not visible in the TeamCity NuGet feed.

Cause: NuGet clients prior to version 3 fail to list prerelease packages if the package version violates the required format.

Solution: Delete build artifacts whose versions violate the required format.

NuGet does not pull recent package version

Problem: NuGet can sometimes skip the recent versions of packages when pulling these packages from the feed.

Cause: NuGet caches the server responses, thus pulling does not detect the most recent changes in the feed.

Solution: To send a new request directly to the server instead of the cache, use the --no-cache parameter in your request.

Cannot use multiline parameters in PowerShell

Earlier versions of the PowerShell runner don't support passing multiline arguments. Since version 2020.1.4, you can enable this support by setting the teamcity.powershell.arguments.multiline=true configuration parameter.

Error while loading VCS changes

Error while loading VCS changes on the TeamCity server startup might be associated with the enabled cursor-based streaming in MySQL. To prevent this error, try setting the connectionProperties.useCursorFetch property to false in database.properties and restart the server.
See this issue for more details.

Last modified: 17 September 2021