Removing search template to improve performance

Emre Toptancı [OBSS]

Many Atlassian documents state that creating custom fields greatly effects system performance so creating a large number of custom fields (several hundreds of fields maybe close to a thousand) is not recommended. The documentation also states that not every field effects the system equally. For example selectlist fields are the least expensive and multiline text fields are the most expensive, since they hold much more information to index.

This makes me wonder, what happens if I set the "Search Template" of a custom field to None? I know this will remove the field from serach indexes and will make search for that field impossible. But some, if not most, of the fields on my customers' systems are for form information only. They do no use that information for searching or reporting.

How much performance benefit would I get by setting Search Template on these fields to None? Will removing the search template of many such fields improve performance greatly or will it be close to nothing?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

It's hard to say.  You'll get some performance increase from removing each searcher, but whether your users will notice removal of one field is unlikely.  If you removed 20 searchers, you might get noticed a bit more.  It very much varies by type of field too.  As you've picked up from the docs, single select lists have much more simple index entries than text fields for example.

The differences are broadly proportional to the size of your data too, so if you've got quite a small JIRA, there's absolutely no point in doing it.   Most important though is where you expect this to have an impact.  The size of the index and complexity of fields affect performance in different ways.  If you're looking for "everything needs to run faster", attacking the problem at the index level is not going to help, as it's only going to improve bits of your user experience (and often not the bits they're complaining about)