Jira DataCenter users, how do you balance performance with customizations?

Question

We have a large DataCenter instance of Jira and we struggle with being able to cater to the needs of our users while maintaining an appropriate level of performance.

We use the Scriptrunner and Automation for Jira plugins, among others, in order to empower our users to automate many of their daily tasks to improve their efficiency. However, this can often result in the instance taking a performance hit (as more customizations are made over time).

If you are in a similar situation, what are some ways that you have been able to allow customizations to meet user needs, but at the same time maintain a performant and stable instance?

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Answer

This is a common scenario that we see with many clients that we work with.  There likely isn't a single thing you can do to solve the problem. Have you done any performance tuning on your application server nodes?  We find that Data Center behaves quite different to server and therefore simply using JVM settings that worked well on your server instance may not work well on Data Center.  I'd suggest doing some performance and load testing while monitoring the JVM and tuning based on the monitoring data. As each instance is unique, there really isn't an effective way to guess what might work well.

Do you have a lot of REST traffic? If so, you might considering routing the REST traffic to a dedicated set of nodes.

In the end, you may need to limit some of the customizations that you allow.  With larger instances, availability and performance may be more important than pleasing every user. If you need to have this discussion, I would recommend explaining the big picture to the individuals involved.  If you let them know that what they are doing is causing a significant issue for all users, I would expect your request will resonate better. You could also reach out to the users and make sure that what they are doing is sane.  You might be able to retool their scripts to be less expensive.