I’m Nikhil, a Product Manager on the Jira Cloud team working on performance improvements.
Performance is an ongoing journey and we continue to invest heavily in it. We understand the performance of our products is mission critical for you and your teams to move your work forward. The goal of this community post is showcase some of the significant performance improvements we've recently made to Jira Cloud and to share what’s on the horizon.
Faster navigation sidebar, page transitions, and next-gen boards & backlogs
I’ll let the below videos speak for themselves, but over the past few months we've made some very significant performance improvements in Jira Cloud.
The Jira Cloud navigation sidebar now loads 2x faster, meaning you can now get wherever you need to be twice as fast.
Jira Cloud’s project directory now loads up to 10x faster, making it smoother than ever to transition from one project to the next.
Next-gen boards load 1.5x faster and the next-gen backlog loads 1.8x faster, so kicking off your next sprint and moving issues into the 'Done' column will only take a fraction of the time.
We’ve also improved text searches - for example, JQL with text ~ by an average of 2x.
Better performance with hosting closer to you
We recently doubled our Atlassian Cloud footprint, launching new hosting regions in Sydney, Singapore and Frankfurt. This complements our existing regions in Dublin and the U.S. and allows us to host your site closer to where the majority of the content is accessed from, which will only further improve your site's performance. You can learn more about our Cloud reliability infrastructure here.
A continued focus on performance
There are a lot more exciting performance improvements on the horizon. For example, you may have caught our recent announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference about the new Jira Cloud for Mac app, which is going to provide a lightning fast Jira experience right from your desktop.
You’ll continue to see and experience performance improvements across Jira Cloud in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, thank you for your continued support and please keep the feedback coming!
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Sorry to rain on your parade, but it looks like you've been optimizing the least frequently used parts. Other parts of Jira definitely need your work much more.
Some examples:
1. the new issue view in Jira Cloud is awfully slow. Even worse than the already slow "old" issue view. All in all it is not usable, first action everybody on our team does when visiting an issue is to switch to the old view.
2. Having fast loading boards is be nice, but I guess most users are not (re)loading the boards very often. At least that's what we are doing: we are moving issues around, doing edits, logging time ... and most of these actions are slow.
Would be great if you could do something about these issues. We've been using Jira for many many years, but with the degrading performance and the recent experiments to push badly implemented "new" features on us, we wouldn't decide again to use Jira, if we had the chance.
I'd love to connect with you regarding your recent and current experience with your customers on moving between Cloud and Server - the process as well as your view on where performance is working well and not so well.
Let me know if you're up for it and I'll come back to you with a way for us to connect.
Thank you for your comment. Good to see you’re noticing the performance improvements. We also recognise that we need further improvements and are actively working on those.
You can connect with @Jason Wong to share your experiences of migration to Cloud and how we can get better.
Thank you for your comment and the candid feedback. I truly appreciate it.
Navigation in Jira was one of the top pain points highlighted by our customers and we’re happy to have made progress in that area. That said, we’re constantly working on improving performance of the other key experiences in Jira, like the Issue experience. We hope to make further progress on these in the coming months.
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
Great that you're making these strides, but I feel you're missing an important point. In the video's above you're comparing the times before and after optimization, which seems like an impressive progress.
I however look at the page and the actual content that's on there. I know I can make a page that shows the exact same information in milliseconds. It might not look as nice, but I can work with it. Than when I can see the content, I don't mind if it takes a second or so for all the functionality to work.
As always, an outsider like myself will miss a lot of the subtleties that go into making such a page and I appreciate that, but the time it now takes to work with Jira is really annoying me.
Currently, we are not a large team, around 10 people. And we don't have thousands of tickets in our board.
Just please try open a devtools in any browser and check the page load metrics. It takes around 14 seconds to load, and it loads around 54MB of data on page load, using way too many requests. Additionally, the Chrome process for this Jira board eats up around 1GB (sometimes 1.5GB) of memory. Now imagine you need to manage 3 projects.
We used to an on-prem have Jira server (v6, then v7). Our server was slow, so was the connection. Never in our experience have we seen such poor numbers.
We will be forced to search for alternatives if this kind of performance continues. Please feel free to reach me for any details.
Update:
I've upgraded my computer to the latest MakBook Pro 16 with i9 CPU, 32 GB memory, costs nearly $4k. This did affect the performance a bit, but not by a lot. UX is painfully slow, clicking on navigation between boards results in opening wrong links due to a delayed responses. This is becoming an increasingly difficult product to use, for a paid one!
I need to second this issue. Everything with Jira Cloud is painfully slow. Nothing has improved over the one or two years we paid for the service. Our team is not productive and will need to look for alternatives. The general feeling is that Jira is very very laboured -- on every click so many widgets, issues, sidebars, and web components need to reload, update, starting the spinning circle... 10, 20, 30 seconds pass... done. I constantly feel reluctant to do anything in Jira, even entering settings, as I forget what I was supposed to do while waiting... Next-gen has not changed the game.
ATLASSIAN: What is going on here?
PS. Even editing this sentence and republishing the comment took all-in-all 35 seconds.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
January 30, 2020 edited
@Daniel Ljunggren and @Rick Zakharov I can see that both of your are site-admins on Jira Cloud sites. I would strongly recommend that you create a support case in regards the specific Jira Cloud performance issues you have noticed. You can do this at https://support.atlassian.com/contact I expect that our support team will need to take a closer look at your individual sites to better understand if there is something we can do to improve the performance there.
@[deleted] - I see that you are an Atlassian Cloud user, but since you are not a site-admin or technical contact on the account, you actually don't have the ability yourself to raise this same kind of support request that I recommended to Daniel and Rick. If you were to try that same link your request would be redirected here to Community. More details in our Atlassian Support Offerings. You could certainly reach out to your Atlassian Cloud site-admin (Bram) to create a performance related support ticket on your behalf in regards to any performance issues with your Atlassian Cloud site.
I believe that support channel will be the best avenue to engage Atlassian with in order to address the performance issues you might have with our Atlassian Cloud products.
About the performance of this particular site (community.atlassian.com):
@[deleted] and @Daniel Ljunggren - You both noted the long times it takes to say load this page, or the complexities in the elements of these comments. I should let you know that this particular site is not actually utilizing our Atlassian Cloud products to bring you Community. Instead this site is being provide by a 3rd party vendor that Atlassian has partnered with. We are aware of the recent performance issues such as pageload times here being rather high. We are in close contact with our vendor to address these Community performance problems both incrementally and long term. But I don't want you to confuse any performance issues you see on this page with performance issues you might be having in your Atlassian Cloud sites. These are completely separate systems.
The Cloud Support Team has been working closely with us (thanks a lot guys, you rock!).
It seems the best way to resolve the slowness it to switch back from Next-Gen project time to the Classic. In our case we see that the board loading times came down from 10-30 seconds to 2-4 seconds. The tickets take about a second or less to open, close and act on.
Yes, the aesthetics for Classic project is not as up to date as the Next-Gen. However the performance and convenience of the Classic totally warrants abandoning the Next-Gen!
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 3, 2020 edited
Thank you for that info @Rick Zakharov. It certainly looks like your support case has spawned considerable investigation into the performance problems you were seeing specific to next-gen projects and boards in your Jira Cloud site. I know there are improvements in progress in these areas that are currently being worked on. We appreciate your feedback here.
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