Why is JIRA so slow?

[Nuon MAO-Phumarun]

I have just installed JIRA on my server. It successfully installed, however, when I tried to bring up JIRA from the Windows start menu it is extremely slow!

Has anyone encountered similar problem?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

There's all sorts of reasons it could be "slow", but as it's a new installation, it's quite likely that...

• You are not giving it enough resources (while leaving enough for the OS to run smoothly too)
• You're running it on Windows is always a bit of a pain - most things run better on Unix, I regularly see performance increases of 10-20% just by moving Jira to Linux on identical hardware
• Your virus checker is getting in the way

With an empty Jira, we can rule out dodgy configuration, users thrashing it, too much data, etc. Start with the virus checker - if you have one, turn it off and see if things improve. If it's not that, then look at the resources - how much memory have you given Jira? Monitor memory and CPU usage while it's starting up.

[Sharath AV [YML]]

It is indeed very very slow in Firefox. It just stalls on many actions.

[fuck atlassian]

Haha, i recently updated sourcetree, after which it stopped even committing files, and the ui designs sucks (im ui designer haha) and i raged a bit, went to their official JIRA tracker for sourctree and...

It crashed firefox  !  hahaha  So bad!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Because it's not slow for most of them, and doesn't crash standard browsers?

"How do they have so many customers" is an excellent question - if everyone were having the problems you are having, then they would have lost them.  Their customers obviously don't have these issues, so the question becomes "what are you doing differently to the users who are not having problems?"

(As for Sourcetree though - the latest release is pretty much reviled by everyone - they got that wrong)

[fuck atlassian]

I dont know and i don't care. I use sourcetree version 1.5.2 (yeah that old) because it was the last reliable build without ANY problems whatsoever, after that everything went downhill for me, starting from ui glitches, lags, freezes on scanning directories etc.

Honestly the best part of sourcetree is ui, and with 1.5.2 stability its perfect for me and my peeps,

as of to ALL OTHER products they just.. poor. Design is dry and poor, everything is slow and unresponsive. Ui of web based sucks big time, if you ask me. I look at github and they just get it, the designers at Atlassian just can't into. they just don't get it, i dunno. Im really happy i didn't make  the decision to stay with them, and a year ago i was hesitating to what platform to use, and gh  is by far superior imo.

[fuck atlassian]

i know man for this exact reason my first meeting with JIRA took roughly 10 minutes, 9 of which i waited different pages to load. first and last.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's the thing - there is something different between your setup and mine.

I've got a bog standard Mac, running Firefox and a fibre connection to the internet.  I'm in the middle of the UK, and Cloud works fine.  It's not quite as snappy as the JIRA that's running on the desktop next to me, but I can clearly blame that on network latency (the machine next door vs a server a quarter of a planet away), and it's barely perceptible anyway.  So what is different for you?  (Yes, Mac, I know.  But it's the same speed on my Linux and Windows machines)

Edit - sorry, I wanted to say this earlier, but hit enter too quickly:

I'm not saying it's not slow for you.  Quite a lot of people have complained, and it definitely fails for people.

None of them have done any of the diagnostic work to work out what they've got differently and published it here.  The people I've worked with who have done the work have discovered broken networks, firewall blocks and an ISP who throttled them.  Not "JIRA is slow", but "our connection is broken"

[fuck atlassian]

If you ask me - i don't know. How can i? I have decent 30 mbs, i have uber powerfult workstation, win10 and latest firefox. When i get these kinds of issues from start, and not only with one JIRA but bucket and sourcetree all have some issues all the time, i just make a quick calc of does it really benefit me to invest time in fixing these issues, as i can clearly foresee that in the future there wont be any less. And as i said i havend opened none of that for a year, until yesterday when their JIRA javascript literally crashed firefox because of whatever reason. I mean it doent add any bonus points, for me its just solidifies as moveton.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

My guess is that you've not tuned it (Assuming it's not whatever is making Cloud slow on your machine).  The defaults are good for a demo or small system, but it almost always needs tuning if you're going to use it for slightly larger systems. 

Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of users NOT experiencing slowness and a lot of them are on massively loaded systems.  So, again, it's not the software, it's something else.

[Glenn Stewart [Atlassian]]

Nuon, please also refer to the following link:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/Crashes+and+Performance+Issues+Troubleshooting

[Dathan Pattishall]

The product is just slow, I have it hosted with atlassian and frequently experience 5-12 seconds response times for pages to load. At this point I want to drop JIRA and use something else, anything else.

[Raj Sodhi]

Yea, I'm experiencing the same thing. 5-12 seconds. A shame, seems like exactly what we need too.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There are two things here. 1. Some users experience massive performance issues with Cloud JIRA, despite having decent network connectivity. Atlassian don't seem to be doing anything to fix this, so those users need to consider hosting it with someone who will fix it (check the partner/expert list) or hosting it themselves where they can deal with whatever the issue is here. 2. If your server is running slow, you've either underpowered it, misconfigured it, or overloaded it. That's something you need to look into yourself. Telling us "it's slow" is not much use, you need to tell us what you've done that makes it slow.

[Raj Sodhi]

Ah, that's reassuring. Basically, the answer is deal with it if you're using Cloud Jira (which is what we use). Hosting it ourselves makes sense, if we had the time and support to do so. But why offer a cloud service that is unusable in the first place? Really disappointing.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Because it's not unusable. I don't have issues with any of the Cloud JIRA systems I've used, barring one, which was down to a really shoddy network connection. Atlassian have recently announced that there are now more active instances of Cloud JIRA running than there are active licences for Server versions, so it really can't be "unusable" I think the question is "why is your setup not handling Cloud as well as other people's is", not "why is it slow", because it clearly isn't for a lot of people.

[fuck atlassian]

Just started trial and it runs extremely slow. useless.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Cloud is running fine for me at the moment, so you probably need to do some diagnostic work. Where are you based and is your network slow?

[Jonas Andersson]

Just stating "JIRA is slow" will not make any babies. I agree that sometimes the instances support.atlassian.com, jira.atlassian.com and so forth are a bit slow, and i wish Atlassian would eat some more of it's own dogfood and show us the value of a datacenter license with enough nodes to make it smooth sailing, and at the same time save their customers from "Go get yourself a snack"-errors during their "planned" outages.

Back to the issue in the question:

Nuon MAO-Phumarun: Stating "JIRA is slow" is like saying "the string is too long". Act like a system admin and figure out what causes it.

How? If you are a firefox user there is a great plugin called Firebug. Install it, activate it and surf to you instance and start looking into where time is wasted. JIRA is notoriously chatty, so what seems like a simple "load a dashboard" is actually a frameset sent over, a java scripts that sends some client side data back to the server, a possible response-time to returns data, and this goes on and on until all elements of the page is loaded.

A simple server configuration error like a dead DNS which gets round-robin'ed in on every 3rd request, can cause minutes of wait on a page that bounces data back and forward 40 times.

Pay attention to what Nic stated as well about server having to little resources handed to it. A plugin like Java Melody can give great insight in which java memory configs that might become exhausted, what actions that causes the server CPU to peak.