Some issues taking a long time to display and/or can't be transitioned

Question

Most of the issues in our JIRA installation load and transition fine, but a few (4 out of 10800 and counting) are taking several minutes to display and in some cases, if you try to transition them, they return with a Communications Breakdown dialog -  The call to the JIRA server did not complete within the timeout period.  We are unsure of the result of this operation.  Close this dialog and press refresh in your browser.

I have not found anything in the logs to indicate where the problem is.

I have tried the Integrity Checker which did find some errors with old items, but none with the issues that are causing problems.

Radu Dumitriu · Answer

Does this appear from time to time with different issues ? make sure you're not having a GC event. Tune your JVM, etc

Does this appear with several issues (you know them well ?). If so, maybe there are too many custom fields, check for heavy custom fields, screens etc

Dieter · Answer

I had this problem once on issues where the workflow had extremely complex conditions. These conditions are evaluated three times when issue is displayed and thus it's important not to put too much long running logic inside the workflow conditions.

J Thomas4 · Answer

You've tried reindexing as well as the Integrity Checker?  If not try this first.

Do the problem issues have anything in common eg use a custom field or workflow plugin which may be causing problems?  Are they in the same project and/or the same issue type? (Possibly a default value on one of their fields?  You could try exporting all fields for them in the Issue Navigator to check if there's anything you don't expect.)