General JIRA Usage with large attachments

[Nikolaj Kingo Marvig]

Hi everyone

This is not a specific question, but I'm hoping to get some input as to how my small department is using JIRA.

A year ago, we started using JIRA and we were very happy with the many options and how fast we could adapt it to our needs. We have a server hosted at a company near us and everything has been working great.

This summer, it was decided to try and use JIRA, not only as our workflow, but also as a database for the many files we use in our production. Files, which often are around 1gB.

Being a bit worried, by this sudden influx of large files (1gB-file to around 1000 issues and rising) I asked our hosting company, if they saw any problems with this approach. They did not.

Fast forward to now, our JIRA instance is running very poorly. Originally, we had simply run out of disk space, but after increasing that this week, we are still facing performance issues. For more info, we have around 30.000 issues in total, 100 custom fields and around 1000-2000 issues with large attachments and rising.

I asked our hosting company, to look into increasing the performance on the server our JIRA instance is running from, but they charge a significant price for this.

My question is then:

Do you consider our use of JIRA, as production database, as a good idea?

It is reasonable to continue down this road and upgrading our server?

Will the server upgrade even fix the problems of bad performance, or is there underlying architecture in JIRA, that makes it bad at handling this way of using it?

If this question is not meant for this board, I am sorry.

/Nikolaj

[Jonas Andersson · Accepted solution]

For the last years i scrutinized every such request.

JIRA is a ticket system, not a fileserver and every tweak made (if only to increase attachment sizes from 10mb to 11mb) this will have an exponential effect, make stuff like backups, migrations, mirroring to test environments and upgrades a living hell. You are much better of adding a custom field that points to a network/samba/cifs/ftp/scp/git-repo path than actually including it all in the attachment directory.

Just my 5 cents, other people might not agree.

[Nikolaj Kingo Marvig]

Hi Jonas

Thanks for your input. I will definitely look into your suggestion! This will also make it easier for me to make a case for my superiors

Our hosting company didn't agree, but I fear they were not the most impartial source, since whatever added cost we have, directly improves their bottom line....

/Nikolaj

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist]]

I'm with Jonas on this - JIRA is not a file storage system.  If you have large files, a proper file store and linking is definitely the way to do it.

[Nikolaj Kingo Marvig]

Ok, thanks for your input Nic

I'll look into a solution like "network/samba/cifs/ftp/scp/git-repo".

[Nikolaj Kingo Marvig]

A followup question: Doesn't JIRA Confluence "solve" our problems? Or is it maybe too extensive, just for file storage.

[Nic Brough [Adaptavist]]

Conflluence is not a file storage system either.  It's good if you import the data and convert it to proper pages, but uploading large binaries is the same for Confluence as JIRA.

[Nikolaj Kingo Marvig]

Ok, thanks again Nic!

I'm very grateful for your help

[Matt Doar [ServiceRocket]]

We have customers using 500MB attachments in JIRA and Confluence, so it works. But we don't recommend it due to maintenance headaches. Options such as Box are better for this