We have a situation where we have a jenkins instance with tons of jobs (ie: thousands). Some of the jobs relate to one another (ie: trigger one another) to form a sequence of build operations (ie: a pipeline). This sequence of jobs is then cloned for each branch to be built.

Further, within this sequence of jobs there are a few common jobs shared by each of our build pipelines. So when one goes to view the dependency graph of the jobs for any one branch you end up pulling in dependent jobs from other branches (ie: transitive dependencies).

This is all fine and dandy in certain cases, however this configuration appears to exploit some sort of limitation within the build graph plugin. It seems that after we get jobs for a few dozen branches created the graph view ceases to function correctly. From what I can tell, the tipping point is when the full graph including transitive dependencies includes a large number of jobs (somewhere between 160 and 170 seems to be the sweet spot).

As s test case I ran a script to generate jobs for a dozen branches in a test environment and the dependency graph works correctly, but then after adding another branch the graph ceases to function.

To make things more interesting, there are no status messages - errors or otherwise - produced by the graph plugin. The image simply fails to generate correctly (ie: shows up as a 'broken link' icon). What is doubly interesting is, the link to view the 'dot' file used to generate the graph seems to work, and based on a quick and superficial eye-balling of the contents it does look correct. So it would appear the dot file maybe does get generated correctly but the image file presented on the dashboard is just failing to generate. Hopefully this helps isolate the problem.