Anti-Virus Software
Continua CI invokes programs such as Subversion, Mercurial, Git, MSbuild etc that create or modify lots of files. Anti-virus software is known to cause major peformance problems with these programs, in particular, fille system write performance. This impacts on Repositories on the Server, when pulling down changes from the remote repository, and Build performance on the agent when syncing cloning the Repository Cache onto the agent machine, and when exporting the source to the Build workspace from the agent's repository cache. In our testing with mercurial, a clone that took 2 minutes to complete, took over 14 minutes to complete when Windows Security Essentials was enabled.
AV software can also cause application errors, such as Access Denied, or File Not Found when invoking compilers and version control clients.
We recommend that you add folder exclusions for the Continua CI Workspace share folder on the Server machine, and the Agent Workspace folder on the Agent machine.
If you are using the bundled Postgresql Database Engine, then you should also add a folder exclusion for C:\ProgramData\VSoft\ContinuaCI\PostgreSQLDB to avoid database errors (av software can cause read timeouts, and issues with backing up the database).