Disable background status checks - TFS

[NorthEast]

I've just put a project into TFS, and after a day's testing the administrator told us that we were making millions of calls to TFS which was slowing down the system to a crawl.

We found an option to stop this by selecting Disable background status checks (in Tools > Options, Source Control).

However, according to the help, now I won't know if any files have been checked out by other users, which is reasonably important when you've got a team working on a single project.

Has anyone else had this experience?
Whilst I'm glad we were able to fix the speed problem, I'd prefer not to have to disable functionality.
Also, I don't know TFS at all, is there anything that can be done in TFS to speed things up?

[RamonS]

TFS is well....this is a public forum. What may be possible is to dial down the frequency of background checks. I don't know how often Flare starts the check, but doing so every two minutes by default and having an option to specify the frequency will probably help, plus the option to do an ad-hoc check.

[NorthEast]

I'll freely admit I know virtually nothing about TFS, but it's what I have to use for source control.
I don't really know where the problem lies, whether it's something to do with how (or how often) Flare is communicating with TFS, or if we just have a weedy server that can't handle it. All I know is that 40 developers had been using that server and when our team of 5 authors started using it the admin guy came to tell us we were killing it.

Anyway, disabling that option just seems to mean that the content/file explorer doesn't show the current status, so I don't know if a file is currently checked out until I try and check it out myself.

[KevinDAmery]

Hmm, sounds similar to the problem I had with VSS when attempting to let Flare manage the connections. I'll have to take a look at that.

Suggestion to madcap: maybe you could try adding a Flare doc to your developer's source control and see what happens

[NorthEast]

At the end of the day we're not loosing vital functionality by having it switched off, but if it is switched on by default then I just thought this problem would surface quite often.