Jenkins Timeout because of long script execution

I've created my own Powershell CI Service before I found that Jenkins supports it's own such plugin. But in my implementation and in my current jobs configs we follow sample segregation principle rule: more is better better. I found that my CI Service works better when is separated in different steps (also in case of error it's a lot easy for a root cause analyse). The Single responsibility principle is also helpful here. So as in Jenkins we have pre- & post-, build and email steps as separate script. About

msbuild.exe

As far as I remember in my case there were issues related with the operations in FileSystem paths. So when script was divided/separated in different functions we had better performance (additional checks of params).

Use "divide and conquer" technique. You have two choices: modify your script so that will display what is doing and how much it takes for every step. Second option is to make smaller scripts to perform actions like:

• get the code source,
• compile/build the application,
• run the test,
• create a package,
• send the package,
• archive the logs
• send notification.

The most problematic is usually the first step: To get the source code from GIT or SVN or Mercurial or whatever you have as version control system. Make sure this step is not embeded into your script.

During the job run, Jenkins capture the output and use AJAX to display the result in your browser. In the script make sure you flush standard output for every step or several steps. Some languages cache standard output so you can see the results only at the end.

Also you can create log files that can be helpful to archive and verify activity status for older runs. From my experience using Jenkins with more then 10 steps requires you to create a specialized application that can run multiple steps like "robot framework".