Confluence - How does attachment storage size impact performance (if at all)?

[Zim __Appfire__]

Hello, community!

In Confluence Server, does anyone if the total amount of attached files in Confluence affects overall application performance? If so, might anyone have some resources I could read up on for more technical elaboration, rather than just a simple "less is better" explanation.

Things I'm hoping to learn include:

• Is the number of files, or total size of files more impactful to performance?
• Are certain file types more impactful to performance?
• Are there ways to identify the largest attachments from directly within the application as an administrator, without needing to click into each Space?

Thanks so much for any insight you have!

Cheers,

Andrew Zimmerman

[Andrew Laden · Accepted solution]

Attachments are not actually stored in the database, they are stored in the confluence data directory in the "attachments" directory. 

So  I don't think that the size of the attachment should not have that much of an impact the overall performance. The number of attachments will because each one is a database record. etc, but not the size.

However, given everything else confluence is doing, I don't think attachments are much of a performance hit. the performance issues usually are around indexing and searching, which don't involve attachments.

On single page, the size may make more of a difference if you are using various macro's to display the content "inline" within the page. Trying to render a large image for example, or if you are using one of the office "preview" macros, trying to render a large file could slow page load times I guess.

Trying to find large attachments may be more difficult.  The file system structure that holds them isn't exactly user friendly for determining what page they are from. So even if you find a large one via a find or other command, I'm not sure how you would be able to track what page it goes to.

But I am not an expert on Confluence internals, so maybe I am missing something.

[Zim __Appfire__]

Thanks for the insights, Andrew. Really appreciate it.

[Pavel Potcheptsov · Accepted solution]

As for your third question: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-can-I-get-list-of-attachments-on-server-sorted-by-size/qaq-p/1082281#M142994

[Zim __Appfire__]

Thank you, Pavel!