Does updating the renderer for a custom field in the field configuration impact Jira performance?

[rneill19]

I received a request to change a Custom Text Field (Multi-line) from the "Default Text Renderer" to the "Wiki Style Renderer" in order to allow hyperlinking. I see this note when I go to update the field configuration:  "Changing the renderer will affect the display of all ~40,000 issues associated with this field configuration. This operation will not change the values associated with these fields. The renderer can always be changed back and the view will be as it was before."

My question is: will doing this impact Jira performance?

[Andrew Laden · Accepted solution]

The renderer should only be called when someone is viewing the issue. So the total number of issues affected is not directly relevant, as nothing is changed in the issue itself, and nothing is different till someone looks at an issue. Its just warning you that each of 40,000 issues will look different (be rendered differently) the next time someone looks at each one.

I would think that the wiki renderer does a little more work then then default text renderer, but not enough to be significant on any single issue. (maybe a slightly little more load time) But if you have a lot (hundreds) of users looking at issues at the same time then it could be more noticeable. Though even then I think more of the rendering work is done client side.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the only way to see how much impact it has to try this in that exact Jira instance.

But in my experience, 40K issues is nothing. Especially if you do this only for a single custom field, then normally you shouldn't see any visible performance degradation.