What is the drawback to increasing the attachment size limit?

[Josh Eastburn]

Our users like Confluence! They want to put everything in there, including PDFs and images. Sometimes these attachments are bigger than the default 10MB limit. Besides making the DB larger, what is the drawback to increasing the attachment size limit?

[Matthew J. Horn · Accepted solution]

Adding attachments does not have to make the DB much bigger. References to attachments are stored in the database (in the ATTACHMENTS table), but the data for the attachments themselves can be stored in either the database or in the file system. I would go with filesystem for most use cases.

Go to the main Administration panel and click "Attachment Storage". Click the Edit button, and then select "Locally in Confluence home directory".

So, in that scenario, the only downside I can think of is just network usage since storage space is neglible.

hth,

matt

[Josh Eastburn]

Sorry, I should have made it clearer that I am currently storing attachments in the DB. Sounds like that's not a good idea, though, if we are going to be putting big files in there.

[CharlesH]

In addition to the points made by Matthew, I would add that larger attachments will create additional load on the Confluence server in terms of indexing. Also, I've had occasional cases where users expect to upload a 30MB image heavy Powerpoint file and have the preview macro deliver sub-second rendering times... If you have good network performance, then your main consideration should be the response times you currently get from your Confluence server. You can check the round trip time you get now with the aid of this macro (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DISC/Response+Time). Once you have a benchmark, then you can increase the limit, perhaps in steps, and check response times again as users make use of the new limits.