TFS builds: failed to do "Get" for random files

Question

First of all, we are using TFS 2013 update 3, and the whole system worked well before today's issue.

Today, both of our 2 TFS build agents failed to do successful TFS builds anymore.

I checked the build log, and found the build process failed at the very first step, CoreGet, like below

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(895,5,895,5): error : One or more errors occurred while performing a Get operation

What’s interesting is, it’s not failed to get every file, but just failed to get some files; What’s more interesting is, the fail-to-get-file-list is not fixed.

In my project, there are more than 10,000 files, and every time, 12 of them is failed to be got, but the files in the 12 are randomly picked (at least I did not find any pattern).The error message for any file is like this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(895,5,895,5): error : C:\Builds\6\NameOfMyFile: Server was unable to process request. ---> Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I checked the local path of build agent, and actually all these files are successfully fetched from TFS server and saved to build agent.

Any ideas what happens?

Answer 1

Could you check the free disk space available on the TFS Server? I got a similar error trying to retrieve files from TFS and it turns out that the disk was full. Clearing up some space fixed it.

This is the full error I got from Visual Studio, for reference:

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Microsoft Visual Studio
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Error Server was unable to process request. ---> Object reference not set to an instance of an object.