JIRA Lock Index Slow

Question

Please forgive my EXTREME ingnorance as I am literally a rookie (just started a new job where I need to support JIRA).  As a server admin I have a new job where there is a JIRA instance running (on-site).  Today, the user community came to me with issues related to people unable to login to the JIRA instance (time-out) and/or slow responses within page-reloads on the JIRA site.\

The site is housed on an internally hosted ESXi host, and the server appears to be healthy and responsive.  This led me to believe the issue was internal to the JIRA envronment.

I saw that there was a way to lock-reindex the environment, so one of the senior stakeholders and I decided to try this since he said that the last time he did this it took JIRA off-line for only 10-20 minutes.  We are now 40+ minutes into the re-index and it is showing as X% complete (in fact the page itself is not easily refreshign to show status, but occationally gives us an update).  SOOOO...this seems to be running VERY slow.

Questions are:

1. Suggestions on if this seems to fail/stall and I stop getting any update on progress?  (e.g. reboot the host server, stop/restart some services, etc.)

2. Any other material on general setup/maintenance/health checks that can be done from either the Jira environment itself, or at the host level?

3. Are there specific places you might recommend to start investigating when experiencing the issues we first saw (slowness, failure with logins, page/refresh time-outs, etc.) when running JIRA on a virtual instance.

Again...sorry for the ignorance.  Any guidance is appreciated.

Gaston Valente_dzz4x1 · Answer

Chip,

A recomendation, you can backup the index on a daily basis, the restore process is much faster is something goes wrong during business hours:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-indexing-snapshot-720638070.html

Hope this helps

Chip Root · Answer

Thanks.  I ended up restarting the application server and was at least able to get back into the dashboard where I saw some failed healthchecks related to the index.  I was able to then successfully run an off-line index, and all appears to be working now.

I will keep an eye on the performance and readdress if symptoms re-emerge.

Gaston Valente_dzz4x1 · Answer

Chip, keep in mind that indexing time increases as the number of issues / fields grows.

If the instance does not grow to justify this, there's a lot you can do:

1. check the doc on vmware performance:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/virtualizing-jira-jira-on-vmware-461504625.html

2. perform a io test

https://confluence.atlassian.com/kb/testing-disk-access-speed-for-a-java-application-818577561.html

3. Start the app in safe mode ( without any plugin active ) and test the performance by enabling one plugin at the time, look at the developers website for performance problems with the plugins. I have a lot of indexing problems due to plugins ( wrong usage or bugs )