High Confluence Server memory usage.

[David Sullivan]

Hi, we have our instance of Confluence Server running with the Java Heap Memory settings set to -Xms 7g and -Xmx 7g.  We have bumped it up a few times after getting out of memory errors.  

We just upgraded to 7.4 from 6.13.  And we received another out of memory error.  A little after it occurred I saw that the memory heap usage was high ( > 90% ), so I will probably be bumping up the Java Heap memory to 8 gb.  From what I've read, this seems high.  We have less than 1,000 spaces, and only a couple thousand users (all LDAP), but we are syncing a lot of groups (in the thousands) which I wonder could be part of the problem.  Also the number of pages may be high, I don't know the pages exactly, but the content values under the Confluence Usage on the System Information shows about 250K current versions and about 800K all versions.

Anyway, has anyone else seen such high memory usage?  If so, did you do anything about it?  Is there other options to prevent running out of memory besides upping the allotted amount?

Thanks for any suggestions or insights,

David

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi David,

I am sorry to hear about these problems. There can be plenty of reasons and it is quite hard to pinpoint the root cause from outside your team what I assume to be the reason why there was no reaction to your post yet.

There is, indeed, good documentation available (https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/troubleshooting-problems-and-requesting-technical-support-776659671.html) which provides a first basis from where to start off. Depending on where the actual problem might be located in can be necessary to have a closer look on hardware (in case the server is not virtualized), OS settings, Apps, memory settings for confluence or even like you already assume a LDAP directory integration.
Probably the first step to take would be to assess the log files - just to make sure there is not apparently error logged.

On the linked page you also find options to contact Atlassian in case you need to reach out to support.

I am afraid that these are only some general hints. As to your question if there is a general problem with memory consumption I'd say it depends by the specific setup and infrastructure. If this is all okay probably only a setting could lead to higher memory consumption - but all of it needs further inspection on site or at least a support ticket (with a support zip provided).

I hope it helps to do the first debugging/analyzing steps.

Regards,
Daniel