Is anyone using the Varnish cache accelerator in front of JIRA or Confluence?

Question

My environment has a 1000 user instance of JIRA, it's busy and I've been wondering what other improvements could be made. I saw the Varnish caching HTTP proxy mentioned on a couple of mailing lists that I'm on. Anyone using it in front of JIRA or Confluence? What are your experiences?

Alessandro Luccaroni · Answer

Sorry in advance for the necroposting, this is for future reference.

We use Varnish+Nginx as http and https reverse proxy in front of JIRA and Confluence. This is mainly because we use it for all of our web services, so i cannot share any information about performance improvements (our installation is pretty small).

Note, however, that with the default config Varnish (ver 2.5 and 4) seems to cause problems to some POST request to JIRA.

To make sure that there aren't any other problems we had to force all POST request to JIRA to pass through varnish with a PIPE (return(pipe), see https://www.varnish-software.com/blog/using-pipe-varnish).

Harry Chan5 · Answer

Hi, you could in theory deploy nginx as a reverse proxy front end with additional caching as well. We do this for some of our hosting customers.

However, performance tuning is not a simple task. Where is the bottleneck? What is causing the slowdowns? It could be the database, Tomcat, the server not having enough memory, a certain plugin miss behaving etc.

Until you've done the analysis, making certain changes might not help.

If you do need professional performance tuning for such a large instance, feel free to give us a buzz @ https://www.cloudshards.com/contact.php

However, if you need specific helps with segments, do post back.