Any concerns for how many linked issues a Jira issue may have

[Drew Smith]

Have a requirement from a client where a project's issues are guidelines. Other projects will utilize these "guideline issues" to help assignees on how they can complete their issues. I can link these other issues to the "guideline issues" using a specific link but eventually there will be 100s of links to these "guideline issues". I am concerned that this will have some performance hit when viewing these "guideline issues" sometime down the road, is this a concern I should have? Are there any other concerns I should be aware of?

If anyone has another idea on how I can link the issues without using Jira linking I am open to suggestions. However there is another requirement for reporting that any suggestion will also need to support which is being able to create a report (or JQL result) to know how many issues are using a specific "guideline issue" over the past 6 mths/year. 

[Drew Smith]

An update on this issue, we wound up using the Insight App as a place to store the guidelines then used Insight Custom Fields as a means to "link" or select the guidelines needed for the particular issue.

[Matt Doar]

How about using wiki pages for the guidelines?

[Drew Smith]

@Matt Doar  thanks for the reply. At this time everything needs to be in Jira.

[Niranjan]

Hi @Drew Smith ,

You may consider creating "guidelines" as "Epics" in JIRA. You can link Tasks/Stories via Epic Link and you can use it for reporting as well. Using too many links on an issue will be cumbersome. With Epics and Stories linked to it, you may be able to track the status in a better way. Just my thoughts. 

[Drew Smith]

@Niranjan   Thanks for the input, Epics are an idea. One thing with using links is Jira only shows the first 5 or so, all the other links are not shown unless a user clicks the "Show more", this will save on loading time when viewing the "guideline issue". When viewing an Epic ALL of the issues in the Epic will be shown, if "guideline issues" are Epics viewing one could take awhile to load over time due to the potential 100s of stories/tasks within them unless you know of a way of limiting that list or hiding it? 

[Niranjan]

@Drew Smith AFAIK, there is no limit on issue linking. There may be insignificant difference in load time when you open an Epic with 100 stories, but that would not be good enough to slow down the system.

[Matt Doar]

There is always a limit somewhere :)

Each link is another row in a table in the Jira DB, so that limit is very high, in the millions at least. However the way that Jira issues have their link section shown means that once an issue has more than a few thousand links it will likely load very slowly. Any JQL function that searches the links will also start to perform badly

This is the same problem you have if you add thousands of comments to an issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, the *technical* limit is very very much higher than the human limit - do your people find an issue with 94375 links useful?  Probably not.  Jira can do it, and handle it gracefully up into the thousands, but that's way way higher than your people will find useful.