Unable to update a page with 959 MB - 1510 MB (or characters)

[Kunal Ashar]

I'm on Confluence Cloud.

I'm trying to update (or even create) a page which will have 1,510,252 characters/bytes (NOT words - it has 101,233 words) by pasting the content into the page editor. After pasting, the browser tab freezes, and I can never update or save it.

This happens on both Chrome and Firefox. It happens with smaller sized content too - 959,889 characters/bytes - NOT words (it has 83,425 words).

My Windows 11 laptop has 32 GB RAM and I've started both Chrome and FF with more memory - as much as 8 GB, but it doesn't help.

I've read that Confluence Cloud officially allows 800,000 words or 5 MB per page, and this content is far smaller than that.

Am I mistaken? Or is there a different limit that I have not read about?

(PS: The answer is NOT to break the page into multiple pages. For business reasons, I cannot break up the page into multiple pages)

[Evgenii · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Kunal Ashar 

The "800,000 words / 5 MB" limit you've seen referenced applies to the stored page body, but that's not the bottleneck you're hitting. The real problem is what happens in the browser when the editor tries to parse and render that much content in a single Confluence document. At ~1 million characters, the DOM becomes enormous and the tab just locks up - this is a client-side rendering ceiling, not a server-side storage limit.

As a workaround, to apply changes, use the REST API instead of the editor UI.
If the content is plain text or you can convert it to Confluence storage format (XHTML-based), you can POST/PUT it directly via the API without ever loading the editor. The browser freeze is irrelevant here since you're not rendering anything.

Body needs version, title, type, and body.storage.value. You can do this with curl, Postman, or a script. I'd try this first - in my experience it sidesteps the editor entirely and Confluence will store content it could never render in the UI.

[Kunal Ashar]

That worked! Perfect! Thank you!

[Kris Klima _K15t_]

Hi @Kunal Ashar 

Yes, large pages do render Confluence non-responsive in browsers. Even on Apple silicon Macs with 64 GB RAM.

There is a workaround that always worked for me.

Warning! I'm going to suggest that you break the page - and put it back together with a little hack :) 

Steps:

1. Split the page into, say, 4 equal parts. 
2. Put each part onto its own page and save (publish) the pages - let's call them Source pages.
3. Create a page where you want ALL the content to live - let's call it MASTER page.
4. On the MASTER page, use Include Content (Include Page) macro - one for each of the 4 pages with your split content.
5. Save the MASTER page with the Page Title that you want to have.
6. You should have a single page that displays all your content.

What happens is that the MASTER page doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting.

Notes:

• The number of those source pages may have to be higher, all depends on how complex is your original content.
• You may want to move those source pages above the root page of the space (Reorder option in the Space settings). The content would still render on the Master page but those 4 pages would be hidden from normal navigation.