Publish failed: Maximum Allowed lines limit - line to be pushed incorrect

SonarQube Cloud
1

Hello! We are using Azure Devops, pushing into SQC cloud for analysis. Using v3 versions of commands (latest atm).

In general, everything works great. We have 20 projects being scanned and the line counts are correct. This 1 project scanned correctly and as i set up quality gates for all projects, this project had a glitch. This project is “working” now, meaning it’s scanning and publishing results again, but we don’t understand why.

Issue: the failure as the topic says, the publish didn’t push because it would put us over the max allowed lines. The project has about 3K lines. The total lines currently is 504K with the limit of 600K, but the error said after the push, the total would have been 613K.

So with this publish of a 3k line project would have increased it by over 100k lines. Wildly incorrect! We looked through everything we could SQC and pipeline and all looked fine. it had completed previous quality gates before. So the last thing we thought was there was some kind of cached elements or something. Switching vm targets “worked”, but not sure why.

  • Started vmImage as “windows-latest”, which is server 2022 (according to the INFO listed in the Analyze step) - publish failed
  • Switched to on-prem server - publish succeeded
  • Switched to “windows-2025” - publish succeeded… but seems it was still 2022 according to the INFO in the analyze logs.
  • Switch again back to “windows-latest” - publish succeeded

So not sure what would have been going on. It’s back to the original version that failed and again all i changed was the vmImage in the pipeline.

The other weird piece of info is: for each failure in this way, the line total result was quite different. we did 3 builds that failed and the total lines would have been:

  • 613K
  • 616K
  • 614K

The project is C# with a website, api, and nuget package. I can post some of the Analyze logs if that would be helpful. The Publish logs don’t show anything except the error.

Again the thought was that it’s including some other project code somehow. Like if Azure reused the image a bunch, which is why we switched vm targets. I didn’t see a way to enable more verbose debugging using the pipeline commands.

Hoping this too will help someone if they encounter this particular thing! I did look at a bunch of posts that had issues with max line limits, but seemed like each of those had actual project changes to be made.

2

Hey there.

If you turn on DEBUG level logging (sonar.verbose=true), you should be able to see every file that is being indexed. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have some third-party libraries that need excluced!

3

Thanks for the reply Colin. How would i do that? Can i just do this:

- task: SonarCloudAnalyze@3
  inputs:
    verbose: true

??

Like I said, just switching the vmImage is what cleared this up apparently. Trying to prepare for if it happens again and seeing if anyone else has seen this issue.

4

It would look like this:

- task: SonarCloudPrepare@3
  inputs:
    SonarCloud: '<YourSonarQubeServiceEndpoint>'
    organization: '<YourOrganizationName>'
    scannerMode: 'cli'
    configMode: 'manual'
    cliProjectKey: '<YourProjectKey>'
    extraProperties:  |
      sonar.verbose=true
5

sweet. Turned that on and will update all of our pipelines to include that so it can be caught if this happens again. Thanks!