Slow JIRA Instance - Is there a way to optimize?

[ebrand]

We are a company of about 500 technical users (not huge in comparison to other companies), however, our JIRA instance has significantly slowed over our usage (past 2 years). Is there any way to optimize an individual SaaS instance to either archive or cache to reduce user experience slowness? Or, is this all coming from atlassian arch setup in general for the instances?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Jira Cloud systems now autoscale to cope with load in general, but you can still have performance problems if you're doing things that do not respond to simple scaling.

Start with a look at what is slow.  Everything?  Boards?  A particular project or set of them?  Certain users or groups of users?   REST APIs?  Dashboards?  

How are you measuring it?  (If you can - you'll usually need something to compare it with - if for example, project 1 is slow and 2 is not, then is it the page load time when viewing an issue, or rendering all the cards when looking at a board, and so-on).  This one is very hard to answer if you thing "everything" is "slow", but it is worth testing it against a clean, near empty (i.e. free) Cloud Jira - is that equally slow for similar actions, despite only having a single project with a handful of issues?