Why are atlassian cloud producs so slow?

[Jürgen Wagner]

Just configuring some confluence spaces and permissions is making me insane because it is really really slow.

Switching a TAB in the confluence settings literally takes 10 seconds!

How is this acceptable in 2021?

Is there anything we can do about that? 

[Thomas]

I can confirm this behavior.

Jira and Confluence behave quite sluggish during business hours. It's varying but most of the time it's slow.

I'm doing quite a bit of work in the evenings (CEST, 9pm) where speeds are always very fast (as expected).

During slow periods, I have the same experience using the same services over 4G, so I can pretty much exclude the local network or machine.

My guess is that this is down to the overall load during business hours.

[Thomas]

@Jürgen Wagner

FYI: there appear to be a few things in the works wrt. performance (Q3-Q4 2021): https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/cloud?category=performanceReliability&search=performance

[Thomas]

FYI:

If you are using Crowdstrike, this issue may be relevant for you: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-77256

[o]

Atlassian, run https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ by yourself and see how slow your site is.

[Rick Terry]

It's actually pretty pathetic how badly Atlassian products score here, and I'm on 1Gbps fiber, so don't say a word about my network connection

Even just uploading this image took ~30 seconds...

[Mykenna Cepek]

You can check a few things on your end:

• Are other users (admins, or non-admins) experiencing long load times too?
• Does the Atlassian Status Page show something other than "Operational" for Confluence at the time?
• Have you tried using a different browser to check the speed for the exact same operation? If it's much faster in another browser, well, it's a browser issue. Try things like clearing cache, disabling extensions, closing/restarting the browser and testing with no other tabs open, etc.
• How is your network speed and latency? Actually run some network tests. Atlassian cloud products are "chatty", so a high latency can hurt. LAN hardware and config can be impactful.
• Some organizational security applications can affect performance. Are there network monitors or antivirus apps running?
• Run a performance monitor on your computer to watch CPU, I/O, network, etc. as you're using Confluence. Is something else (maybe in the background) using a lot of resources?
• Do you have enough RAM? Is your computer more than 3 years old? etc.

Most people with performance concerns like this experience them only intermittently. The above incomplete list is some of the non-Atlassian things that can substantially affect perceived speed.

There are also times when the Atlassiverse is not performing optimally, but they monitor and correct those issues, so they should not persist for days. If they do, reaching out to support is the next step.

[Dwight Holman]

From our location high latency was normal on Atlassian Cloud during testing last year and this year. We want to add more Atlassian products in the Cloud and migrate our existing ones from Server, unfortunately we are based in a country that doesn't have a AWS DC.

It seems that for some users the combination of Atlassian's software and the AWS platform just doesn't deliver a responsive user experience.

I wonder if Atlassian's algorithm for choosing the 'nearest' AWS DC might not be optimal in terms of latency. For now there is no work around for that.

We raised support requests to Atlassian but they did not provide any solution, improvement, or alternative options.

For now we won't adopt a product that is slow, and Atlassian won't sell us new Server products (though we know from testing that they perform better due to lower latency).

More flexible data residency should be available for the cloud in Q3 2021, but given the Atlassian heritage for under-delivering on customer requests, my expectations are low.

[Rob Horan]

"Is your computer more than 3 years old?" - That's going to be true for many.

Just sayin'

[Dwight Holman]

@Rob Horan- well I don't think that is a crazy thing to say. A lot of businesses refresh hardware on a schedule. But I agree that old PC hardware could be a factor.

In our case; we replace workstations at 3 years old, so nobody in our team uses a device over 3 years old. The computers with the smallest RAM have 16GB. Last year we switched to buying systems with 24GB for our development team. I don't think our client hardware is likely to be a factor.

Our office has a fibre connection at 950Mbps down and 450Mbps up, and all users are on 1Gbps network interfaces. I don't think our network infrastructure is likely to be a factor.

Our testing (comparing Confluence Server vs Confluence Cloud) indicates that network latency is important. i.e. Server was much more responsive. It also seems that your browser choice (i.e. anyone choosing not to use Chrome) can be a significant factor.

Atlassian continue to claim incremental improvements for Confluence and Jira:
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/cloud-performance-updates-q4-fy21

The performance we see on Atlassian Cloud will benefit from these improvements, but will always be subject to the general internet congestion and latency from our location. Maybe we just expect too much?

[Rob Horan]

I'm using a laptop from 2015 for work, and I feel that's less extreme than the idea that most non-enterprise businesses have the money to refresh their hardware for all users within 3 years at a time.

[o]

Typical Atlassian answer of shifting blame.

[Sergey Pavlov]

Yeah. Tell me about the fundamental difference between three- and four y.o. PC from a perspective of using HTTPS resource? ))))
I suppose Atlassian is trying to find equilibrium among the optimal cloud resources scalability and cost for its customers. But we won't hear the truth like, "OK, guys, we will scale out our platform, but you'll be charged accordingly..." However, the current strategy will lead users to seek an alternative platform and, as a result - the loss of Confluence clients.

Hence, the reality is somewhere in between code optimisation, efficient scalability policies and optimal customer billing.

[Benjamin DUPUIS]

It slow on my Ryzen 5900x with 64GB or memory, before we were onpremise we had no performance problem, now it's so slow ... so it's not a computer problem.