Jira performance - dropdowns slow and selecting wrong item

Question

We have a setup of Crowd 2.4.2, Jira 5.0.6, Confluence 4.2.11 all running on Oracle 10g with Dataguard.

Our users have Internet Explorer 8. Some users have the possibility to use newer versions of Firefox.

Multiple users of our Jira instance are complaining about the Jira performance.

Dashboards are loading slowly, but this is understandable.

Most troublesome are the dropdown lists.

Sometimes the dropdown is lagging behind after the mouse pointer and skipping some entries in the list.

This results is selecting the wrong entry.

The screenshot is taken in Internet Explorer 8.

In our Citrix environment with IE8 the selection is lagging more than in our Windows XP development environment with IE8.

I already looked at the database monitoring, I attached the output as PDF. This does not look like the bottleneck.

Please advise on how to improve the situation.

Tiemco de Jong · Answer

Thanks for the suggestions.

A screen sharing session with Atlassian Support not possible, so I tried to reproduce the situation on my personal pc, outside the company.
However at home I can't reproduce the problem, not on Windows 7 nor on Windows XP.
I tried JIRA 5.1.8 on both versions of the OS on fysical hardware.

Our company has thin clients using Citrix and Powerfuse to provide the desktop.
From Citrix I can connect to a virtualized Windows XP machine.

I can reproduce the problem from the machines inside the companies firewalls, but not when no firewall and/or proxy is needed to connect to the outside world.

It looks like there 2 options remain:

* some javascript is used from an other machine then the jira server, running into firewall/proxy problems
* the Citrix / Powerfuse desktop is causing mouse events to be skipped, so the browsers can not do their job properly

We still want to try reproducing with the latest Jira 5.2 on Windows 7 and some local browsers inside the companies network.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The symptoms you are seeing are suggesting a slow network connection.  It might be a compound - network heavy "bad" javascript on the client side making heavy/frequent requests over a slow network.

The way to work this out is to monitor the server side.  You've looked at the database already, and I'd agree with you completely that it's not the database.  But what is the application server doing?  Is the CPU flat out?  Spikes when the users try things?  Memory usage?  If the application server is ok, then you have to look at the network and the clients.

Tiemco de Jong · Answer

I'm looking at this problem with Atlassian support and checking with https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/223/is-there-a-way-to-improve-the-performance-of-my-instance-rather-than-only-increasing-memory.

I can reproduce the mismatch of selection with mouse cursor with Jira 5.1.8 and with all our browsers (IE8, FF15, Chrome 22), both on from Citrix and from virtual XP machines.

I have tested with Jira servers (physical hardware and virtualized hardware) with Jira versions 5.0.6 and Jira 5.1.8. Database is Oracle 10g.

I suspect it is an issue in the Javascript code.