Symantec must be uninstalled from the server that you want to install JIRA applications

[Jacques]

Hello,

On this page it mentions that Symantec must be uninstalled from the server to not have performance problems.

Does anyone have more info about this? I'm in a situation where we have a Linux server with some Symantec products installed (not antivirus) and I need some background info in order to convince sysadmin to remove Symantec. It is true that our server is suffering performance. We have checked all other options like JVM, disk space, CPU, etc... but to no success.

Anyone has some more detailed info about this?

Thanks!

Jacques.

[crf · Accepted solution]

Virus-scanning software like Symantec's generally work my monitoring file activity on your system and looking for malicious content in them.  This applies particularly to executable content like JIRA's .class files and to archives, like .jar files and .zips, but it can be configured to scan data files as well.

JIRA is a large application with multiple files.  It uses Apache Lucene indexes that are frequently accessed and modified.  It has issue attachments that it can peek at when they are attached to an issue.  In general, it is a very filesystem-intensive application, and having something else watching what it's doing, scanning the contents for malicious byte sequences, is quite a bit of overhead.

The knowledge base article indicates that you may not need to disable it completely, but you should make sure that JIRA's application and home directory are excluded.  I can understand wanting to scan the attachments directory, as end users upload files to that area.  It also has much less write activity than the other directories.  I would definitely make certain, however, that you exclude JIRA itself, its plugin directories, its avatars, and its lucene index files from anything like that.

[crf]

Rereading the question, Nic saw what I overlooked...

The concern, as made clear by the knowledge base article, is definitely Symantec Anti-Virus, not any other products by them.  (Of course, that doesn't mean their other products couldn't cause problems, too – only that it is the anti-virus software that is known to have a performance impact).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I suspect the author of that document only knows Symantec for their anti-virus software. 

You need to remove any anti-virus stuff (and anything else that might be scanning or interfering with the files deployed by JIRA or the JVM it runs in), or at the very least, ensure it is not running against the JIRA installation - some anti-virus stuff can be configured to ignore certain directories or processes and that can work.

However, for your general performance comment, start at https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/crashes-and-performance-issues-troubleshooting-203394749.html