Filter Subscriptions: How Frequent is Too Frequent?

[Haddon Fisher]

We have a smallish JIRA server instance which we use to manage customer-facing support, and recently we've been getting complaints that email notifications take 3-4 hours before reaching people's inboxes. I started keeping an eye on the mail queue, and sure enough it would regularly get up to 300+ issues pending processing during peak periods.

I did a bunch of troubleshooting without much success, but watching that mail queue I saw a particular filter subscription continuously showing up. I initially assumed each entry was a different recipient of the same subscription, but after looking it up I found that a single user had set up a cron subscription to fire every minute; moving the subscription back to 15m seems to have solved our queuing problem.

After poking around I don't actually see any documentation or best practices on this. I get that it's probably unnecessary and that there are better ways of achieving this, but I'm curious if this is an actual application limitation or just because our VM doesn't have enough uumph?