what are potential problems of maintaining an epic with 1000's of issues?

[Sai Mutyala]

We have an epic that will have 1000's of issues added to it each year as old ones get closed. Is it advisable to split the epic by year to limit number of issues an epic may have or is it ok to have unlimited children under an epic . 

[Jovin · Accepted solution]

Hi @Sai Mutyala 

This is a great usage question and each team need to find out what works. In terms of usability here are the implications:

• Difficult to find specific stories/issues - As the number of stories or issues grows in an epic, the overall list grows, this can make it hard to visualise what is active, to do or done.
• Performance issues - In the client web view of the epic it will be quite slow as it will need to load ALL of the child issues in the view. This makes the rendering of the view slow, can cause the tab to also run slow due to the number of elements.
• UX issues - The list of issues in an epic cannot be "collapsed" as such, ALL issues will ALWAYS be visible whether they are to do, in progress or done. In addition, you'll need to scroll past all of the issues to get to the comments.

Let's take a look at the Atlassian definition of an Epic: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics 

In this we look at the Epic being a specific feature, goal, or milestone in the delivery of an overall project.

You may want to instead create an issue "above" Epic (this requires Jira Premium) called "Initiative" that groups these, and the initiative could be "2025 Delivery" or "Q1 2025" or similar.

[Sai Mutyala]

Hi Jovin, Your response was insightful . This helps . We will plan accordingly. Thanks.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Sai Mutyala 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Adding to this, while there is no limit to the number of child issues an issue can have, there is a limit in the UI that no more than 500 child issues can be displayed when viewing any given issue. If you have thousands of issues as children of an Epic only 500 of them will be able to display when you view the Epic.

There are also limits on how many issues you can see in the results of a filter (limit=1000) and how many issues can be displayed on a board (limit=5000).

I would suggest that you refine how you use Epic to reduce the scope of each Epic and thereby reduce the number of issues that will be children of each Epic.

[Sai Mutyala]

Thanks Trudy . We am planning to break our epics into multiple epics by year .