How can I get Jira running using less memory

Brian Price April 21, 2013

I would deary love to use Jira in my new job, but when I installed it onto the only server I have available, it filled the memory and ground to a halt.

I only have available a Windows 2008 server with 1Gb RAM, of which at least half is already in use. Is there any suggestions you have for getting Jira running well on a machine with not much memory?

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Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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April 21, 2013

You are going to have problems. Use an off-machine database for a start, install no plugins, create minimal users and projects. You can tune the various memory heaps, run jvisualvm on the box.

Assuming a 32bit OS, so your JVM will be a 32 bit also, 64bit Java in your situation doesnt work.

If you can get JIRA running at all, I'd suggest locking the RAM into the VM by setting -Xms and -Xmx the same, ie min/max window is XXXX then, arbitrary processes can soak up more and _they_ will fail rather than JIRA.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 21, 2013

When Andy says "minimal users and projects", he really does mean it - you'll struggle with more than 3 or 4 users and 10 projects.

Seriously, get more memory!

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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April 21, 2013

Yep, I have most atlassian apps running in VMs for dev/test/etc, they are all 32bit linux, 32bit JVM, all have colocated database (Postgres), all are at between 1024 and 1700MB, and all are 'minimal'...

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Brian Price April 22, 2013

Thanks for the replies. The server is a hosted VM, and is the only place I have available, but we also run our own software off it for demo purposes, so I don't want to restrict the amount of RAM that has available to it.

I guess I'll have to look at the cost of increasing the memory on there.

Thanks again.

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Harry Chan
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April 22, 2013

Hi, windows Server 2008 would be using a lot of the memory. Minimal stripped down of Linux, e.g. Debian can run using <64MB of RAM and leave the rest for applications. 32bit JVM as said.

You can probably get away with less than 1GB and run fine for many users (however usually 1GB would be the minimum). Try to tune the JVM. Use -XX:-UseSerialGC instead of the parallel version. Use the latest version of JIRA that you can and ensure you use the latest Java 7 if possible.


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