Custom Elements and System Performance

Sam Griffin April 10, 2019
What elements (custom fields, statuses, issue types, etc) have the most impact on jira data center performance? I’m wondering what to target for the best return on investment for standardizing and cleaning up a system.

1 answer

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Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 24, 2019

Hi Sam,

In my experience, by and far the most impact in terms of Jira performance seems to be the number custom fields, but this impact is also dependent on the number of Jira issues too.   This tends to be because when custom fields are created, they frequently are default configured to be in a global context only, meaning that this custom field could appear in all issues across all projects.   That tends to put a considerably higher overhead when it comes to reindexing Jira.  Each custom field requires a new lookup via SQL in order to update the value in the indexes.  So the math looks something like

(# of Jira issues  * # of custom fields in a global context) + (# of issues in projects with a custom context  *  # of contexted custom fields) = a rough estimate of the number of SQL lookups that have to happen to reindex an entire site.    So the more issues with more custom fields tend to add up to have far more overhead in regards to performance for Jira.

Notably, Jira 8 does greatly improve the performance of indexing thanks to some updates to the lucene that were put into the code.

But I would also recommend checking out the Jira Sizing guide to get a good idea of first how Atlassian would characterize your Jira installation size based on a number of different elements in your system (users, custom fields, issues, schemes, priorities, workflows, etc).  Since you also asked about data center, I would also recommend the Jira Data Center size profiles.  It is more recent of a guide and more applicable to data center specific deployments.

I hope this helps.

Andy

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