Package Sources Diagnostics

NuGet Package Sources Diagnostics

Status: Incubating

Issue

The work for this feature and the discussion around the spec is tracked here - Add ability to ignore failed sources in VS #5643

Problem

Customers often complain of performance issues with retrieving packages in search, installing and updating packages. Often when we analyze these individual issues, we find that in a large percentage of cases the issues users are seeing are due to the following. Package Sources here refer to:- File shares, NuGet.Server's, 3rd party repositories and NuGet.org.

• NuGet package sources response times are slow
• Nuget package sources are behind a corporate firewall
• User is offline
• The backing file shares of NuGet.org are either not optimized or very large.

We want to proactively inform the users of these issues, so they can take corrective action and/or give them an option to temporarily disable certain sources for a period of time of the session.

Who is the customer?

Any customer who has a slow network, works offline and online, has NuGet.Server installations and have package sources behind corporate firewalls.

Evidence

TBD

Solution

Scenarios that hit a file share/ server (ordered in terms of priority)

• Update: Checking for updates. Fetching and installing packages.
• Package restore
• Browse/Search; Search in package manager UI and list in PMC
• Install
• Detailed metadata fetch (Click on package)
• PowerShell autocomplete
• Consolidate

Diagnostics Scenarios (Ordered in terms of priority)

• Server is not accessible: Server is not available or server can't be reached. ** Consider the case when searching in all sources finds the package in one source and not in a disabled source, the customer expects that package assuming it has no dependencies to install fine **
• Server is slow: Package has a large number of versions (1000+ CI feeds). Server implementation is not optimal for large version set
• FileShare is not efficient
• vNext (Requires proxy rules): Semantic understanding of what packages are being downloaded per source
• Duplicate URLs and equivalent URLs
• Server URL points to an invalid server - the endpoint is not a server
• when a misbheaving source is an intermittent issue that resolves itself

Priority of experiences

• VS
• PMC
• NuGet.xplat
• Nuget.exe

Walkthrough

• User opens Visual Studio
• User open package manager UI
• Sees an update and hits install
• We detected 1-N issues
• We bring up a UI that shows what the issues are
• This UI will have single disable for duration command, disable for all time command
• On clicking this package manager enters into temp disable mode, we show some indicator that you are this in this mode.
• You can either get out of the temp disable mode by using some command in VS or restart VS
• If the user clicks permanently disable, then there is no highlight forever and goes through normal flow.