Upgrade from 3.13 to 4.4.4 taking over a day

Question

We ran the upgrade process on another machine to test out the dependencies.  It seemed pretty straight forward.  We took an XML backup of the current running system.  Then we used the backup as part of the new install.  The install process took about 1.5 days to complete the XML load.

Is there anything we can do to seed that up?  Is there a way to do the last year of data, then finish with a top-up?

Since we use this in our production environment for our customers, we are trying to minimize the time Jira is offline.

Thanks!

Ernesto

Adam Saint-Prix · Answer

Hi Ernesto,

Few questions for you regarding this upgrade. How large is your JIRA instance? Can you tell us roughly how many issues your 3.13 instance has? How many custom fields do you have? All of this can be found in the System Information in the Admin section of JIRA. Admin>System>System Information

Also, how much memory you have allocated to JIRA will impact how long the upgrade process takes. The more memory you can throw at it, the quicker the XML restore/upgrade process will be.

For what it's worth, the JIRA upgrades from versions prior to 4.0 can take some time - there are quite a number of upgrade tasks involved that extend the upgrade time considerably. I seem to recall some of the upgrade tasks for things like converting certain custom fields to system fields (resolution date I believe was one), converting portlets to gadgets (another doozy) and converting to use the new JQL search to name a few extended the timeline quite a bit.

Having said all that, a day and a half seems extremely long though. More reasonable would be a few hours (1-3 hours say) depending on the size of your instance. That's not to say it couldn't take longer, but more than 5 or 6 hours, I'd be surprised about. For reference, I did one recently on an instance with 150K issues that took about 2 hours to complete with 4GB Ram allocated to JIRA. This was on RHEL5, but not an XML backup, but MySQL db upgrade.

If you haven't altered the default memory settings and have more than say 25,000 tickets I'd try increasing memory for starters. You can also tail the log files (or use some other utiltiy) to watch the upgrade process in the console to see how far along it is. The logs provide good feedback on upgrade progress and you can easily see what, if anything, may have gone awry.

unknown · Answer

The complete Upgrade process.  I will try to turn off the re-indexing and see how much that helps.  I did notice it re-indexing many times along with exporting and reimporting XML data.

JamieA · Answer

I couldn't get the trick of disabling indexing mentioned in that bug report to work, hence I modified the classes themselves...

FWIW, from 4.2.4 to 4.4.3 took around 24 hours, 300k issues, 74Gb ram on the box, about 8Gb allocated to jira iirc.