Best practices for managing large-scale projects in Jira without performance issues?

[Hedda Gabler]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with Jira for managing projects, and as the number of issues and workflows grows, I’ve started noticing some performance slowdowns and difficulty keeping everything organized.

I wanted to ask the community:

• What are your best practices for handling large-scale projects in Jira?
• Do you recommend splitting into multiple projects or keeping everything centralized?
• How do you manage workflows, boards, and automations efficiently at scale?

I’m especially interested in real-world experiences—what worked for you and what didn’t.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Hedda Gabler 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Another factor to consider is the number of issues in your system. As the number increases, searches slow down. One way to mitigate this is to Archive older projects and/or older individual issues. The issues/projects archived can still be viewed if you have a direct link to an issue, but the data can't be changed. And the issues are removed from the index which improves the performance of searches.

[Fabian Lim]

Hi @Hedda Gabler ,

Welcome to the community!

The approach will largely depend on how the organization and its teams collaborate. If the teams share the same members and there are no concerns around access restrictions, consolidating work into a single project is a viable option. In that case, you can leverage custom fields such as Components or Teams to logically separate work streams and sprints.

For Data Center environments, a key performance consideration is to minimize the number of custom fields and make use of field contexts to scope them appropriately.

Regarding workflows, the recommended practice is to keep them as generic as possible so they can be reused across projects. However, once a workflow becomes unique to a specific team's process, that is typically the point at which it makes sense to break the work out into a separate project.

Having a lot of plugins also slows down the system significantly as well. 

Regards,

Fabian