server memory

[Michael Ryan]

Hi there we have a server version of support desk., with knowledge base and tempo time sheets.

The server is a high end Azure server.

When we do a memory usage check jira is constantly using around 50% and no jira activity other than us logged in is taking place.

How do we fix this please

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Michael,

I understand you are using Jira Service Desk along with Tempo timesheets and you have some concerns with Jira appearing to constantly utilize 50% of the system memory even when it appears to be doing very little.

Jira is a Java application.  As such, when Jira starts up it is creating a JVM environment within that host operating system.  That JVM has are two different parameters that define how much memory Jira is allowed to use from the operating system: -Xmx and -Xms

• Xms is the minimum amount of memory this application will be able to use.
• Xmx is the max amount of memory Jira can use.

In a server environment, these are values that you can change in your Jira instance.  However Jira will only honor these change after it is started or restarted.   Personally, I'm a strong supporter of setting these two values to be the same and suggesting to set them slightly higher rather than lower.  The reason for that is if you set to different values when the application needs more memory or does a garbage collection to potentially eliminate heap size, the JVM can do a stop-the-world event to achieve this.  These cause the application to hang until the operation is complete.  Sometimes these are very fast, but for large heaps, these can be very slow.  Most admins want to tune Jira for performance sake so settings these values to be the same tend to avoid these resizing operations.  More details on how you can adjust these are in Increasing Jira application memory. But also a lot more information on tuning garbage collection in Garbage Collection (GC) Tuning Guide.

But stating that Jira is using 50% of the memory isn't really enough information for us to understand if that is expected or not.  How much system memory is available to the operating system itself?  How much memory is Jira using at startup (in terms of MB or GB)?

I am a strong advocate for the Jira Sizing Guide as a means to better help administrators understand what we expect for Jira in terms of resources given the size of your Jira environment.   Even for the smallest of environments, we recommend that Jira's JVM Heap size have at least 1GB of memory, and that the operating system have at least 8GB of system memory.  

I hope this helps, but please let me know more about your environment.

Andy