Well, since your own site is throwing database errors, I can't give credence to some of your complaints about system performance, especially where DB access is

Well, since your own site is throwing database errors, I can't give credence to some of your complaints about system performance, especially where DB access is concerned. You've moved from GitHub issues (a free service with more limitations) to a hosted JIRA instance, but there's no indication of the number of issues or users. I'd look into the other articles, but your infrastructure has crumpled under the current load. I'll have to revisit this in the future. JIRA demands a set of dedicated hands to mitigate some of the issues with complexity when it comes to workflows - particularly when there are a bunch of eager, yet disenfranchised hands granted power over implementation-wide workflow, screen and issue configuration parameters. Guidance and change management philosophies apply to JIRA, as well as any other core tool. Atlassian's hosted JIRA instances are not high-performance. They support up to 2,000 users, but you're paying $1,500 per month for the privilege of a) month-to-month hosting b) managed infrastructure and updates. You can't take the license with you when you leave, and you have zero control over the performance of the instances. This is the tradeoff, and your situation is how it's usually (painfully) realized. Now, I'm not an Atlassian apologist. I find the lifespan of some of their bugs extremely disappointing, as well as the nature of some of them. Many of the problems you describe mirror what I see as a consultant providing guidance and rescue to teams who have; inherited a (now critical) skunkworks JIRA installation, operated without a dedicated administrator, outpaced the sizing of their instance, or gone completely crazy with plugins to the extent that they can no longer identify what features are JIRA and which are plugins. Workflows, black arts that they are, have been left to grow as bramble. Team/project/product hierarchies are managed from the bottom up, as opposed to top down, as is the rest of the organization. These all have remedies, apart from Atlassian's habit of leaving bugs to languish (despite being voted on), which arguably has a remedy of its own. Limina's sounds like every other frustrated rant I hear from Atlassian users.