Need support/suggestion - Revamping a project with 400000 tickets

Question

We are planning to re-design workflow of a project which has 400000 tickets in it and also we want to add new fields, remove scope creation, add new status/transition in the project.

Obviously it would ask for re-indexing the project.

Is it safe to re-index a project with 400000 tickets ?

After these changes what would happen to existing tickets ?

What happens if something fails during re-indexing, recoverable ?

How much time would take for re-indexing, approximately ?

Is there any other suggestion for this kind of requirement like create new project  not disturb existing project, etc.,?

Kerem Caglar _Solveka_ · Accepted Answer

Hi,

Under normal conditions it is safe to reindex. Still there are numerous factors that might cause failure or errors in reindexing. Especially addons and customizations.

Performance of the reindexing depends on number of custom fields, number of history items in issues etc. In addition there is a huge performance improvement in Jira 8 with respect to Jira 7.  As an example we did a full reindex of 300K issues with 200+ customfields in 45 mins on Jira 8.5.x. If you would like to complete faster you could try to increase the number of reindex threads (see https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/increase-speed-of-reindexing-in-jira-server-826879636.html)

You asked what happens to existing tickets; after reindexing nothing happens to the existing tickets. Reindexing process does not modify issue data on the database. It just re create Lucene indexes on the index files. What happens is for example, if you added a new CF and before you do reindex, if you search for that CF, you'll get nothing for the old issues. After reindex you'll get results.

Before you do the reindex it's better to get a backup of your index for recovery.

Iago Docando · Accepted Answer

Reindexing is not an issue, i believe.

Existing tickets statuses will have to be mapped to the appropriate statuses from the new workflow. Jira provides you with a wizzard to do this during the change of workflow.

Any new MANDATORY field won't be present in the old tickets so you will have to bulk edit those prior to assigning the new field schema.

You'll have to check any automation / integration with external systems you have currently set up just in case the new configuration affect those.

I can't think of anything else right now.

The alternative is of course as you mention starting a new project.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

I'm not going to repeat most of the stuff I completely agree with from @Kerem Caglar _Solveka_  and @Iago Docando

But I would say that re-indexing a project is a moderately calcuable thing (unlike the full re-index option)

If you could create another project with the same settings, and put in a broadly representative swathe of say 4,000 issues, try running a re-index in that, and time it.  You can then take that time, multiply it by 102, you'll get a good expected time of doing the main project.  (I've said 102 because there's a little bit of non-isssue based overhead in the index)