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Why is confluence alone using significantly more resources than my entire operating system?

Why is confluence alone using significantly more resources than my entire operating system?

Here is a plot of my CPU usage, running manjaro linux, firefox.

Notice the low section of the graph? That is was when I closed all confluence tabs and kept everything else I use for work open.

Why is a text editor using orders of magnitudes more system resources than the entire rest of my system combined? Why is your tool the only one that I use that causes my laptop to lag to a point that I have to close all confluence pages?

Every single other website works fine for me, except for confluence. Can you please optimize your code?

3 answers

0 votes

Hi @kilian_liss

I hear you.

Confluence looks simple on the surface, its editor and real-time collaboration engine run a complex web app under the hood (handling dynamic rendering, live autosaves, complex macros, and permission checks). That said, it certainly shouldn’t be causing system-wide lag to this extent.

I hope you have tried the below:

Check Hardware Acceleration: In Firefox settings, try toggling Use recommended performance settings off and manually toggling Use hardware acceleration when available to see if GPU offloading improves.
Try Confluence in safe mode.
Close Editor Drafts: If you leave unused editor tabs open (in draft state), background sync polling will run continuously. Saving or closing inactive draft tabs helps significantly.
Run network diagnostics and capture the HAR.

If you face these again, submit a ticket to Atlassian support with all your details.

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Maybe we simply have different expectations for what is acceptable. User "Miguel Santos" also thinks that confluence is surprisingly resource heavy, meanwhile user "Kris Klima _K15t_" with a M4 Macbook is also reporting lag once tables become hundreds of rows big, yet he thinks this is normal.

Libre office has most of the same features that you mentioned (online collaboration, complex macros, live autosaves), and it starts to lag at 600,000 rows.

When I download the same confluence page as a markdown document, it is 16 kb big (no pictures). How hard can it be to render 16kb worth of information?

The video game Old School Runescape was a browser based game from 2001 that was capable of rendering 3D graphics, yet a modern day editor struggles with a 16kb document that has a table with hundreds of rows.

I 100% believe you when you say that there are many complex things happening under the hood... Do things really need to be that complex or could they be optimized?

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Validation is key here: yes, it can absolutely be optimised.

What users can do

Avoid Mega-Pages: Pages with hundreds of rows, large tables, or dozens of dynamic macros. Instead,
- Split huge pages into smaller sub-pages using a clear parent-child page hierarchy.
- Paginate Data: Configure macros (like Jira Filter to show paginated results (e.g., 10-20 items per page) rather than rendering everything at once.

Close Inactive/Idle Tabs: Confluence maintains active WebSocket connections and local state buffers while an editor tab remains open.

What admins can do

Audit Third-Party Apps & Plugins
Set Data Retention & Version Cleanup Rules

References

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0 votes

Hi @kilian_liss and welcome to the Community.

In your post you're quoting CPU issues but the image shows GPU totals...

Anyway, I'm on an M4 MacBook Air and have about 25 tabs with Jira and Confluence pages open in a couple of windows in Chrome and while Chrome does occupy most of the 32GB of memory, the CPU is barely used (10-15% utilization).

Now, what can cause lags is when you are editing a really really big page. Say a page with a table with hundreds of rows.

But other than that, I haven't experienced 'Confluence lag' for years (not even on an M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM).

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Yes, my bad, wasnt showing the full plot:

CPU totals is the top plot, GPU totals is the bottom upside down plot.

Yes, I have noticed bigger pages are commonly laggier, and we do have a lot of tables.

With that said, a CSV with 10 million rows is about 100mb big, and my editor can edit it fine (once things have loaded once). I've just tested libre office calc, it starts to lag at about 600,000 rows.

If confluence starts lagging at hundreds of rows, wouldn't that be an issue?

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0 votes

I don't think you're the only one experiencing this. I've seen Confluence become surprisingly resource-heavy on certain pages, especially in Firefox. A quick test in a fresh browser profile or another browser might help rule out extensions, but Atlassian should definitely look into optimizing the frontend if this is reproducible.

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Sure, I'll test it out on my gaming machine as well then.

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Why is confluence alone using significantly more resources than my entire operating system?

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