7 ms·

Jira is in a league of its own. With latest stable Firefox on a Macbook Pro from 2014, I get a full 10 seconds loading time for the notifications sidebar. Every

Jira is in a league of its own. With latest stable Firefox on a Macbook Pro from 2014, I get a full 10 seconds loading time for the notifications sidebar. Every click in Jira takes between 5 and 15 seconds. It is absolutely nuts and it seems like many people just don't understand how insanely bad it is (but obviously many engineers do ;) Meanwhile my browser can load, render, and scroll a 4000 line colored diff in less than half a second (e.g. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=01897f3e05ede4d66c0f9df465fde1d67a1d733f https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...)

sb8244 8y ago
Is your jira heavily customized? I haven't seen this level of slowness and use it daily. I know that customizations can be the root of evil on jira
- notduncansmith 8y ago
  And this level of open-ended configurability is why many vendors prohibit benchmarking. While Atlassian is exceptional in some regards, this is not one of them.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    If jira is slow crap when used in the way real people use it then isn't this a meaningful fact worth sharing?
- ploxiln 8y ago
  It looks pretty standard ... it does have GitHub integration enabled, and custom fields and workflow for each project, which seems like a pretty standard thing for organizations/users to do. But my key anecdote is about loading the notifications sidebar after the page has loaded, there shouldn't be any customizations in there. But I dunno, maybe Jira gives managers a bit too much rope with which to hang their development teams.
cco 8y ago
Are you on Jira Could? I've never seen a self hosted Jira instance that slow.
- ploxiln 8y ago
  Yes, it's the Atlassian-hosted version. I have heard that they did a complete re-write for the on-premise version, but will probably never be able to replace the old codebase ...
  - cco 8y ago
    Ah interesting, I think this is the disconnect I always have, I've never used their cloud based version. This reinforces for me that JIRA should always be self hosted.
setquk 8y ago
Try Tempo for JIRA. Seeing 60 second load times for pages sometimes. I’m going to have to open a timesheet entry for filling in timesheet entries.
LolNoGenerics 8y ago
At least we're getting paid well for watching load indicators. Atlassian should make a step forward and show funny cat gifs to increase satisfaction.
Liskni_si 8y ago
Our team is responsible for deployment/operations of our self-hosted Jira so a few months ago I decided to make it faster, and oh what a rabbit hole that was: When you look at Jira using Chrome DevTools there are these big batch.js and batch.css files (up to 5MB in total) that are different for every type of Jira view (dashboard, agile board, issue detail, issue search, …) so the first few page loads might be a bit slow but then they all should be cached as they don't change until you update your Jira and everything should be smooth. Except that wasn't what I saw, they seemed to be reloaded every hour or something. Naturally I blamed Jira, and wasted hours Googling for batch.js not being cached, but eventually came to the conclusion that it can't be Jira's fault, and it isn't. Turns out it's the Google Chrome's cache backend that's used on Linux (and only there). There are three issues with it: 1. it's limited to cca 320MB even if you've got 1TB free space 2. entries are evicted by age times size, ignoring number of hits 3. media files such as 2MB youtube fragments use the same cache The result is that watching youtube for a while evicts all cached batch.js. To make this bearable, I enabled gzip in the reverse HTTP proxy in front of Jira, which brought batch.js down to 500KB so that it's smaller than the youtube fragments and isn't evicted sooner than those. Still, few hours of watching youtube and not visiting Jira evicts it. Increasing the cache size using "google-chrome --disk-cache-size=2000000000" helps as well. Oh and here's the link to Chromium issue tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=617620 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=617620 :-)
- lambdadmitry 8y ago
  I suspect the root of the problem is that 5mb js/CSS blob itself rather than its caching. It's absolutely nuts and its most definitely not needed for what Jira does
aprdm 8y ago
We host our own Jira on-prems behind an apache server and it's pretty fast. I am actually surprised by how fast it is. In previous job we used jira cloud and it was terrible.
Underqualified 8y ago
In my company we use a PLM system for technical drawings. Jira is an absolute dream compared to that.

sb8244 8y ago

Is your jira heavily customized? I haven't seen this level of slowness and use it daily. I know that customizations can be the root of evil on jira

notduncansmith 8y ago
And this level of open-ended configurability is why many vendors prohibit benchmarking. While Atlassian is exceptional in some regards, this is not one of them.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  If jira is slow crap when used in the way real people use it then isn't this a meaningful fact worth sharing?
ploxiln 8y ago
It looks pretty standard ... it does have GitHub integration enabled, and custom fields and workflow for each project, which seems like a pretty standard thing for organizations/users to do. But my key anecdote is about loading the notifications sidebar after the page has loaded, there shouldn't be any customizations in there. But I dunno, maybe Jira gives managers a bit too much rope with which to hang their development teams.

cco 8y ago

Are you on Jira Could? I've never seen a self hosted Jira instance that slow.

ploxiln 8y ago
Yes, it's the Atlassian-hosted version. I have heard that they did a complete re-write for the on-premise version, but will probably never be able to replace the old codebase ...
- cco 8y ago
  Ah interesting, I think this is the disconnect I always have, I've never used their cloud based version. This reinforces for me that JIRA should always be self hosted.

setquk 8y ago

Try Tempo for JIRA. Seeing 60 second load times for pages sometimes. I’m going to have to open a timesheet entry for filling in timesheet entries.

LolNoGenerics 8y ago

At least we're getting paid well for watching load indicators. Atlassian should make a step forward and show funny cat gifs to increase satisfaction.

Liskni_si 8y ago

Our team is responsible for deployment/operations of our self-hosted Jira so a few months ago I decided to make it faster, and oh what a rabbit hole that was: When you look at Jira using Chrome DevTools there are these big batch.js and batch.css files (up to 5MB in total) that are different for every type of Jira view (dashboard, agile board, issue detail, issue search, …) so the first few page loads might be a bit slow but then they all should be cached as they don't change until you update your Jira and everything should be smooth. Except that wasn't what I saw, they seemed to be reloaded every hour or something. Naturally I blamed Jira, and wasted hours Googling for batch.js not being cached, but eventually came to the conclusion that it can't be Jira's fault, and it isn't. Turns out it's the Google Chrome's cache backend that's used on Linux (and only there). There are three issues with it: 1. it's limited to cca 320MB even if you've got 1TB free space 2. entries are evicted by age times size, ignoring number of hits 3. media files such as 2MB youtube fragments use the same cache The result is that watching youtube for a while evicts all cached batch.js. To make this bearable, I enabled gzip in the reverse HTTP proxy in front of Jira, which brought batch.js down to 500KB so that it's smaller than the youtube fragments and isn't evicted sooner than those. Still, few hours of watching youtube and not visiting Jira evicts it. Increasing the cache size using "google-chrome --disk-cache-size=2000000000" helps as well. Oh and here's the link to Chromium issue tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=617620 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=617620 :-)

lambdadmitry 8y ago
I suspect the root of the problem is that 5mb js/CSS blob itself rather than its caching. It's absolutely nuts and its most definitely not needed for what Jira does

aprdm 8y ago

We host our own Jira on-prems behind an apache server and it's pretty fast. I am actually surprised by how fast it is. In previous job we used jira cloud and it was terrible.

Underqualified 8y ago

In my company we use a PLM system for technical drawings. Jira is an absolute dream compared to that.