Will excessive amount of groups cause performance impact?

Question

I was asked to do a health check on a JIRA instance. One of the things I noticed was an excessive amount of groups. Over 3000. Many of them empty. The groups are from an LDAP user directory.

Does JIRA look at every group when checking permissions?

Will/Can this impact performance? I would think so but am unsure.

Dave Thomas6 · Answer

I'm glad someone asked this question.  At our company, we're thinking about automatically creating groups in Crowd based on jira project role membership.   The reason for doing this is that there's still no concept of project role that's visible across the entire Atlassian suite.  You can assign permissions based on group membership in any Atlassian application, however.  The idea is to delegate project role membership administration to the project leaders in jira and to use the groups that are automatically created to assign permissions within the relevant Confluence space, Bamboo Plans, Fisheye repository, Crucible project, and Stash project.

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Answer

Excessive amount of anything will cause performance issues! There we some known issues with large number of groups but the critical ones are addressed in the later JIRA versions. Not sure if there are any open issues but I would still be vary of a large number of groups.

You might want to reduce the number of groups synced to JIRA using a group filter or by narrowing down the base filter.