The JIRA server could not be contacted.This may be a temporary glitch or the server may be down.

fabby August 9, 2012

sometimes jira is very slow,and as a result an error displays as below.

The JIRA server could not be contacted.This may be a temporary glitch or the server may be down.

and when i Clicks "Source" tab,jira works slowly,after few seconds,the source page will show warnings about the repository errors.

i think it may be the fisheye error.

10 answers

2 votes
Dave C
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
January 23, 2013

This commonly seems to be an error displayed client-side by the browser Javascript. I would suggest trying our Troubleshooting Browser Problems KB (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/Troubleshooting+problems+in+the+browser) and also try enabling safe mode on the browser and even clearing your cache. You could also test with other browsers to see if there's any difference between them.

If you find it happens periodically, you can try taking a thread dump and also enabling garbage collection logging to see if there's any performance problems on the instance. Also check to see what's happening with your server when JIRA is slow - a high CPU can often mean GC is going nuts, which can be a result of not enough heap, a bug or a naughty plugin that has decided to use up more memory than it should. These will help:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/Garbage+Collection+Performance+Problems

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Generating+a+Thread+Dump

1 vote
Jacques
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January 8, 2013

I have the same error message. I'm pretty sure it's a programming issue, since it happens to me when I create a filter that comes up with no result.

It doesn't necessarily have to be with custom fields. Also built-in fields provoke this same error. Try to filter for an assignee of which you are sure s/he doesn't have any issues assigned. You should see this same error. What's more. The filter result will show the same counter statistics (1/10) as the last filter you ran before getting this error.

Regretfully I have not yet found a solution. Anyone has?

thanks,

Jacques.

Renjith Pillai
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January 8, 2013

Does this happen with all plugins disabled, I means Safe Mode of JIRA?

JamieA
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January 8, 2013

This can happen when a query passes validation but throws an error, for instance when a function runs. The error message is incorrect, it should say something like "the query had an error", not "the server could not be contacted". I don't think this is the issue the OP has, sounds like slow fisheye. Is there any other kind of fisheye?

0 votes
Colin McDermott_GLiNTECH October 12, 2020

This was bugging us quite a bit. 

We would find this message regularly occurs when users would search and specify a project or other filter item. 

A very helpful guide:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/operations-that-are-related-to-user-lookup-resulting-in-the-jira-server-could-not-be-contacted-this-may-be-a-temporary-glitch-or-the-server-may-be-down-error-941365405.html

What we found is when we looked at developer tools (under Chrome ctrl + shift +i). and did a network trace that the client firewall was blocking the request with a 1020 message. I.e.

What should happen

Your PC -> Firewall -> Server

What does happen

Your PC -! Firewall =error

If you can Greenlist your browser's IP address, any reverse proxy (or bypass it for testing) you should be able to make this message disappear. 

Worst bit is none of this will turn up in the Atlassian logs because it is all browser side. Switching browsers or clearing cache does nothing as it's your firewall blocking the error. 

0 votes
Jerome LeBlanc September 6, 2018

We are seeing this error when a user adds a comment to an issue after clicking a link to the Jira issue that has extra characters.  For example, if I want to go to https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-24907, but the link I click is https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-24907abcd, I get to the issue just fine, but when I try to add a comment I get the "The JIRA server could not be contacted.  This may be a temporary glitch or the server may be down."

Honestly, I would have expected the link to return a 404 page not found error.

I would report this as a bug, but I get another error (User 'jeromelb' doesn't have the 'Assign Issues' permission) when creating an issue on JRASERVER.

Khoa_Nguyen April 23, 2020

I have move to other server and occurre that error? Why?

0 votes
roymeo August 2, 2016

Just started seeing this (and spinning wheels that never end) with JIRA Cloud after a Windows 10 upgrade in Firefox 47 & 48.  Works in Chrome.

 

0 votes
Andrew Naito May 11, 2016

JIRA - Chrome issue.png

Several of my users just got this error, and it turns out it only affected chrome users.  FireFox and IE were fine.

 

 

Andrew Naito January 5, 2017

In the end, this problem was fixed once I updated the JIRA server to the latest version.  Unfortunately, that broke other things.

 

0 votes
Santosh Maurya February 15, 2016

I had this same issue, mine was because of Workflow...  When issues is moved to DONE in a workflow, I use to get this error... it was because I was using a screen to show up when the issue is moved to DONE... A value was set in Post Function to show up a screen... when removed, it worked...

I have to see why that screen was causing this issue, atleast now I can push my issues to DONE...

0 votes
Shane Hatt August 7, 2013

I am currently experiencing this with different users (and sometimes myself).

- IE/Chrome/FireFox

- Using "Basic Mode" in Issue Navigator

- Custom Filed "Tester"

Please confirm for me the troubleshooting steps?

0 votes
Theodore Tzidamis
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November 1, 2012

This also sounds like https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GHKB/Upon+Upgrade+to+GreenHopper+6.0.1+the+Agile+Menu+Generates+an+Error

Try cleaning up the Tomcat cache to see what happens there.

If this has been fixed (I see it's an old post) feel free to comment here on what you did in case someone else encounters the same problem. ;-)

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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August 9, 2012

You'll need to read your logs to find out what it's pausing on, and probably increase some logging to find out what's going on here.

Start at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/JIRA+Performance+Tuning if your logs don't show anything specific

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