File Storage in Confluence - Replace SharePoint?

Scott Boisvert

We're in the process of rolling Jira and Confluence out in our organization. I just finished the roll out to one area where we've typically used SharePoint for file storage. The team made the comment yesterday they want to completely move away from SharePoint and utilize Confluence as not only their collaboration tool, but also file storage. It was noted that some of these files could be quite large video files (I've not been able to get specifics yet). I currently have the attachment limit set to 100MB. 

Given we are on server version we can expand the storage if necessary, are there any other issues with storage of large files. Will there be any kind of performance hit from a system perspective? We're on 6.15.1.

Thanks in advance.

Stephen Sifers

Hello Scott,

Congratulations on making the move over to Jira and Confluence. This is a great question, will files larger than 100MB on a server product cause performance issues. The answer, however, may not be as clear as the question. In short, the answer is, maybe. This is due to a couple of factors in how the Confluence server and underlying infrastructure is deployed. I will break it down as follows:

• Ensure you have enough bandwidth internal and external to handle the videos and their streaming requirements. You will also need to ensure this bandwidth is designed for multiple users streaming/viewing concurrently.
• Ensure your storage which the Confluence server and its directories are located on are fast enough to serve the content you’re wanting to store. A slow storage disk/array may cause performance issues and Confluence will become delayed in presenting content.
• Question if you NEED to store video content within Confluence itself. There are multiple other services which allow you to storage video content external to your server while allowing you to link/play the videos elsewhere. A private youtube channel would be a good example of this.

There are articles which can help to understand how to tune and adjust Confluence to have better performance based on your needs. These articles may be found here:

• Performance Tuning
• Server Hardware Requirements Guide
• Managing Application Server Memory Settings
• Running Confluence in a Virtualized Environment

I hope this information proves helpful and you’re able to deploy and use Confluence without any performance issues.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers