.CSV bulk import is VERY slow - what can be causing this?

[Tracey Harrington]

 It doesn't seem to matter whether the .csv file I'm attempting to upload has 1 row or 100 rows - the validation is getting stuck at the same percentage and is incredibly slow.  I have done the exact same thing every day last week with no problems at all.  

[Piotr Mederak]

Thanks for posting the update. This is a good reminder that the CSV file can look small but still carry something strange from Excel: hidden formatting, unexpected delimiters, broken rows, extra empty data ranges, encoding differences, etc.

For anyone finding this later, I would test imports with:
1. a freshly created minimal CSV,
2. only a few rows,
3. plain UTF-8 encoding,
4. no copied formatting from the original workbook,
5. the smallest possible set of mapped fields.

Full disclosure: I built Excel Backlog Importer for Jira. One reason was to avoid some of this CSV preparation pain when the real source is an Excel workbook. The app lets you upload XLSX directly, choose the worksheet/header row, map fields, validate rows and preview the import before changing Jira.

It will not fix a Jira-side performance problem, but it can reduce the amount of fragile manual Excel → CSV cleanup.

[Tracey Harrington]

Just an update for anyone who has the same issue at some point in the future.  Based on what I'd read from others with similar issues, I suspected that Jira was somehow interpreting the number of issues in the .csv as being far more than what I thought I was importing, so I went back to the version of the excel file I had been using when it worked well and that resolved the issue.

[Andy H]

Hi @Tracey Harrington 

There are a few different probable causes.  It could be that the site is under a heavy load, and the time it takes to complete these imports is impacted.  But from past experience and the way you describe this problem, I have seen the Lexoranking system in Jira cause CSV imports to drag to very long waits.  But this is only the cause if lexoranking has a specific problem.

There is a way to check on this.  You'll need a Jira Admin, then navigate to the gear icon in the top right > System, from there on the left navigation panel, scroll to the bottom and select the option for "LexoRank management".  This page has a button for "Run Integrity Check".  If any of these checks fail, then it's likely the ranking system that is causing the problem.  

If they all pass, well, it must be something else.  Either way (pass or fail), you should probably create a support ticket with Atlassian if you can. If there is a fail, definitely share that with the support team.  Only support would be able to correct the ranking system to fix this. https://support.atlassian.com/contact/

Granted not all users can create support tickets directly.  But if you are an admin of a site with a paid plan, then you should be able to create a support case for this.