Stability Problems Jira

[Corinna Führing]

Hello, we set up JIRA knew, but there are some stability problems.... could this be due to too many issues created in JIRA ? Cause Gantt Chart is also not working so good because with too many issues it can not load

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It's very hard to say what might be wrong without any information to go on.

What are the "stability problems"? 

JIRA does scale to millions of issues, but having lots of issues in it becomes a problem when users try to actually use it - huge piles of issues are intensive to work with.  The problem you'll run into is that you don't really know what is causing stability issues and it could be almost anything.  Your resources may be too low for the current pattern of usage.  You may have hit a bug in the code.  You may have users doing vast unneccesary searches (my favourite one is the people who can't be bothered to think about their reports, so they download thousands of issues to Excel so they can massage the figures instead of representing the data correctly - puts a massive strain on the system).  An external system that's hitting you with hundreds of REST calls.  A slow network.  Index is not on a fast local disk.  Some of the internal configurations can cause load (quick win - use "anonymous" browse if you can), and it's worth housekeeping dead fields and schemes.  There are a lot of add-ons that don't scale as well as we'd like, so one debugging action would be to disable add-ons and see if the problems change.  (I learned that one the hard way - I wrote a plugin to do something for my users and it worked.  But I didn't think they might use it with filters returning tens of thousands of issues, and my plugin broke it totally when they did.  You'd be surprised at the add-ons that make it to marketplace that make similar mistakes to me)

So, look at the numbers of users, projects, issues, and what your users are actually doing.  Read the logs - if the stability is "crashes", they will contain information.  If it's slowing down to a crawl, consider thread traces.  Check your hardware is adequate.

And this is worth a shot if your stability issue is "it's slow" rather than "it crashes and needs restarting" (although it can help with that too) - http://www.adaptavist.com/w/atlassian-performance-tuning/ Obvious disclaimer - Yes, I work for Dan, I sat though that talk six times before Summit as he practised and refined it.  I still go back to it when I run into a flaky running JIRA because it covers everything to look at)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

p.s. If it's "a bit slow", you'll be tempted to throw more memory at it.  Do not do that without reading about it first, as you can make things worse.  Dan's speech covers that too.

[Corinna Führing]

Hello Nic, thanks for your answer....basically my issue right now is that I am using the Gantt Char add on of Frank Polscheit, and have massive problmes loading it. He said that loading 4000 issues for a Gantt View is not possible. Is that the case with all the Gantt Charts. I know that 4000 Issue s are too much for a Project Plan (should not be more than 300) to get an overview, but anyhow ..if for next Version I have that kind of Issues in JIRA (Features, Bugs, Test Cases ect) all that summs up to 4000 Issues ...than what should I do If I want an overview of work to do till next release (Mainly i need it for customer...they want the plan and critical path) ..so my question is if I can use any Gant Chart plugin to show critical path...beacuse the amount of Issues is just that in the project...otherwise i make a plan with Project (nice and fine...but not based on my data in Jira-just some nice pic for customers)....PS: So i wondered if 4000 is already too much for stabiility of JIRA but c ant be...do you know if with Big Pictures Gantt Chart i had also problems to load 4000 Issues into one Gantt View ??

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'd tend to agree with Frank here - Gantt charts are intended for high-level views of a project, or for planning small parts consisting of a managable number of tasks.  4,000 is simply not a useful thing to try to do on a Gantt chart, the detail is too intricate and the complexity will obscure the overview.  (I was told by a Prince 2 expert that a Gantt should fit on an A3 page and still have distinct readable items otherwise it's useless.  That's certainly the case for 4,000 items).  For the high level, group them into Epics and do the Gantt on those alone, for the low level, create several smaller ones, per team or project for example.

I'm guessing your stability issues happen when you try to draw up an impractical Gantt then?  Not at other times?

[Aleks Yenin (Polontech)]

What exactly stability problems? If long page loading - JIRA can have a poor memory

Increasing JIRA Memory