POST /rest/api/3/search/approximate-count — intermittent 10–30s latency in production

[Alejandro Enrique Marín Astorga _CL_]

Context:
We use the Jira Cloud REST API v3 with a service account (Basic Auth) to power an internal support portal. When loading the "My Tickets" page, we perform 3 parallel calls to POST /rest/api/3/search/approximate-count to display counters in the sidebar (open, closed, created).

The issue:
Since May 20, we’ve been seeing intermittent response times of 10 to 30 seconds on approximate-count requests.

JQL pattern we use:

project = "HELPME" AND (
(reporter = "accountId1")
OR (cf[10023] = "accountId1")
OR (cf[10615] = "xxxxxxxxxx")
) AND statusCategory != Done

Questions:

1. Does approximate-count have a separate or stricter quota/rate limit compared to POST /rest/api/3/search/jql? Is this documented anywhere?
2. Does querying against a non-indexed custom text field in approximate-count JQL cause a full index scan? Is there any way to verify whether cf[10615] is indexed for JQL in our instance?
3. If we make 3 parallel approximate-count calls within the same second, do they count as a single quota unit or as 3 separate requests?
4. What is the recommended alternative for obtaining accurate issue counts efficiently at scale (thousands of issues) without using approximate-count?