Queuing of TFS build against agents

Question

I have a TFS 2010 build service installed with three agents: Database, Production, and Release with mutually exclusive sets of builds running on each.

When builds are queued, unfortunately, they appear to get queued in groups of three regardless of which agent they're ready to go to. This means that we lose the parallelism I was hoping for if more than three builds from a single agent are run at once as they will take up the entire queue.

Is there a way to make sure that builds are queued once their own agent becomes free so that we can have as many parallel builds as possible?

Answer 1

Using the TFS 2010 default build defintion you cannot select an build agent but only a build controller unless you have customized it. Ideally you should have a single build controller, which has multiple build agents beneath it. Within the build definition you would only be selecting controller name and the build controller pushes the build to the agent which is free at that point. You can also use TAGS to make sure that the build runs on only a particular build agent.