Best way to get past the slowdown after installing a plugin

[Josh Powers]

When we install a plugin into JIRA the whole system slows down for quite a while.  If we reindex it doesnt seems to help speed things back up. After every page has been visited once or twice it starts to speed back up.  First off, is that normal, and second is there some command I can run on the admin interface that will do whatever it is doing all at once and thing come back for normal operation?

Thanks

[Dave Hergert]

Not sure what version you had, but we had this EXACT problem when we were on JIRA 6.1 (I think). Any time I updated a plugin, each page would take 2+ minutes to load, as if the page were compiling. And then once it loaded, it could be reloaded instantly. Then you'd go hit another page, and if you happened to be the first one to hit it, 2+ minutes again, and then after that... now THAT page was snappy and so on and so forth.

The problem went away when we upgraded to JIRA 6.3.x, and also updated all our Agile, Tempo, etc plugins so its tough to say if it was a plugin or JIRA but I would highly suggest you get on the latest greatest as that corrected the problem for me.

I don't recall the slowdown occurring when we made Administrative (workflow, custom field, etc) changes, but I could be wrong.

[Josh Powers]

Alright I will give this a shot tonight, we have JIRA 6.2 so maybe whatever it is has been fixed in 6.3. This is exactly what we experience so it makes me hopeful. And indeed changing workflows and custom fields don't update it and its funny we often define it as feeling like "a compile" as well. At least we aren't the only odd ducks out there.

[JamieA]

Probably this issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-37337

[Josh Powers]

We are running JIRA v6.2 with Agile 6.6

[Dave Hergert]

Josh - can you throw your JIRA version info in here?

[JamieA]

Installing plugins clears many caches, which can take a long time to repopulate, particularly with say Oracle.

This can happen when you have many custom fields and field configuration schemes, as IIRC it does pretty much the cartestian product of those two things in db queries. Lots of projects with lots of roles is also slow.

If you can't fix the underlying problem, don't bump the plugins so much. At my place we never change plugin versions outside of official release windows.

Is it also slow when you add a new field config, or add a new role?

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

I would say this is NOT a ubiquitous situation - and the next question is WHICH plugin? Do you know? 

If it happened after installing a new plugin, maybe you are right that the plugin is the culprit. Check the logs and see if you see any entries that also seem related. Then if you know, you could perhaps reach out to the vendor of the plugin and share your findings. See what they say. Vendors always appreciate that chance to improve vs be blamed when they might have been able to fix. Give them a chance.

If you are not sure on which plugin (if any - could be other issues), you can use safe mode and thru the process of elimination try to figure out. Pretty tedious though.

Bottom line - I don't think you can assume it is a plugin fault unless you know for sure.

And No, it is not on all plugins. They are all different and created by different vendors with different Atlassian dev skills who should be looking out for performance non-degradation in their testing etc.  

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

Ps pls don't share *which* plugin - that was a rhetorical question. Reach out to the vendor and give them a chance..

[Josh Powers]

It is definitely not a specific plugin, every time we install any plugin, it happens, the slowdown only lasts for about 10 minutes then everything is back up and running. It doesnt matter if it is our plugins or a plugin we get off the market. We have installed some of the big name plugins too and they all do it as well.

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

Ok - good to know it's consistent. But that's all we know for the moment, here (not meant condescending - there's just a lot of things going on in the JIRA system). Next I would ask: how was overall system performance BEFORE you noticed the plugins slowing your system down upon install? I think this section of this page explains it well. https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/Troubleshooting+Performance+Problems#TroubleshootingPerformanceProblems-Plugin(third-partyorbundled) Excerpt: Plugins, especially third-party or in-house (developed internally), can cause a significant number of problems with JIRA. They can consume the DBCP, memory (heap usage), slow down issue operations and cause any number of other problems. Best practice is to verify if the performance problems are still experienced when no plugins are enabled. This can be done by enabling Safe Mode in the UPM will verify whether or not a plugin is a problem, however it comes at the detrimental impact of reducing the instance's functionality. This can be a hard case to make to the business, so we recommend this be done on a replicated test instance (that is, one identical to production). In short: Everything affects everything, and understanding it all in your JIRA is study, experience, and monitoring/maintenance since all environments also are unique in their configs, screens, fields, plugins, etc. Just my guess, but I think the slowdown from the plugins is a symptom of something else possibly. That page has a bunch of tips on performance tuning and I would bet you would find one or three+ nuggets in there to help. Jaime's comments are good too - but also since there's no consistent versioning of plugins across the board of vendors, hard to not bump some plugins sometimes. Some are required - and yet another variable. Bright side: See it as learning how to become a JIRA performance artist? That's an in-demand skill!

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions]]

Hi Josh - I asked an AppFusions dev (Colin Goudie) for a deeper dive answer than mine - and here's the input - maybe helpful: "Plugin updates sometimes require the plugin to be extracted, scanned for OSGI deps etc..So if they are getting a slow down, perhaps they are lacking resources such as CPU, memory (causing swap usage) etc.. as the app goes under heavier load. Are they maybe also reindexing in background after plugin updates? that would slow it down too." So - up your resources and system overall and maybe you will find some improvements. Cheers!