Currently we have a Jira server instance hosted in the US. While it works fine locally, we have a large development team in India as well, and the user experience is less than stellar there, to put it mildly. Given the reality of physics (latency) and the quality of internet links in the region, it seems like there's only so much that can be done, but wondering if anyone else operates in this manner, and has any creative methods of tackling this issue. With our existing setup, users see something like 5-15 second page load times for viewing and editing issues.
AFAIK the Jira Datacenter deployment depends on a co-located cluster of instances, i.e. within a single datacenter or AWS region, and wouldn't necessary help alleviate this pain. If that is not correct, please let me know.
Thinking about:
- Using a CDN. We tried this with the jira "dark" property (jira.fixed.cdn.enabled) and it did reduce first page loads substantially, but once static content was cached locally it didn't reduce reloads.
- Implmenting http gzip compression - Not sure how to do this, as I've seen docs that advise against compression. Our login screen pushes down ~5MB of data so it seems like compression would be helpful. Currently reverse-proxying through apache so would need to make sure that's done in the right place.
- Migrating to jira datacenter edition
Any other ideas or feedback? Working with our network team to determine feasibility of dedicated MPLS / etc. to improve things on the network side, but for this discussion assume we're not able to make the network better.
