memory leaking when using Jira

[Alexander Korenev]

Hi!

We have an issue with memory leak when using Jira. It has such behavior: after restarting the virtual machine it works perfectly, but a day later it allocates all the available memory, gets into the swap and starts to work slowly. What should we do to solve this issue? We use the jira version 7.2.1 installed on our server Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS. What other information should I provide?

[Michael Brown [Ascend]]

Are you using the JRE that came packaged with the JIRA installation tool? Use the JavaMelody Monitoring Plugin for JIRA: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/net.bull.javamelody/cloud/overview

This will help show you where you may be having issues. 

You may also not have enough JVM memory allocated to your JIRA instance. If you are working in a fairly large enterprise, using anything under 2GB allocated to your JIRA instance may cause serious performance issues. Instructions on how to increase your JVM memory: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver072/increasing-jira-application-memory-828788060.html

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That can be a long and difficult thing to establish, but I would start with getting a thread trace after it starts to run slow, so you can get an idea of what is consuming all the memory.  Although I'd start with some logging changes to get more information dumped.

There are lots of docs on this, but I tend to start with https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/crashes-and-performance-issues-troubleshooting-203394749.html , https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/clean-up-the-leak/ and https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/jira-applications-crash-due-to-outofmemoryerror-java-heap-space-191069.html (not so much about leaks, more about the crashing when leaks get too large, but the principles of investigation are still good)