What slows down a Kanban with many Issues: total Issues in Project, or Issues in the board Filter?

Question

E.g. let's assume 1,000 Issues total for a Project called XYZ.

Assume 10 Epics, 100 Issues per Epic.

There's a Filter called XYZ Filter, currently showing all 1,000 Issues.

If I edit the XYZ Filter to only show, say, 1 or 2 Epics, will that improve performance when using the Kanban, or is Jira still 'looking up' all 1,000 Issues across the whole of Project XYZ?

Thanks.

Dave Mathijs · Accepted Answer

Hello @Luke

Your Kanban Board has a filter limited to 1 project (XYZ) only, right?

Having 1,000 issues on a kanban board - regardless of performance - is not best practice in my opinion. Depending on the number of columns, this would mean an endless scroll of cards within a single column which cannot be visualized on one browser window (page), not even 5 windows.

What would be the requirement of the added value of having so many issues on your board?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Hi Luke,

Atlassian suggest no more than 500 issues on a board, and most consultants see them become pretty much useless to the end-users at 250+ (information overload, not performance).

It's not as simple as this, but the performance of a board is a function of several things, the main one being filters, of which there are between one and four types you have to think about

* Board filter
* Swimlanes
* Quick filters
* Card colour filters

The problem here is that you don't just end up running each one of these once, they all have to be run over the same data.

The board filter is the base filter, only run once, and the results are cached as a feed into everything else.  But let's say you've got 2 colours, 3 quick filters, and 4 swimlanes.

This means your board is running 25 filters, over a potentially large set of issues.  That's going to affect performance, heavily.  (And yes, the quickfilters get run, even when inactive)