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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test purpose no less than 50 times.

The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8 Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server.

90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL

Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be)

JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun. We only use fisheye and Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience.

In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software package I've ever used.

Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.

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My experience is more like yours. I've used Jira a ton of times and any problems we've had using Jira/Greenhopper have been organizational. The only problems I've had with Confluence have been fixed in newer versions.

Similar - 1 GB VM, allocated a single core, MySQL backend. Been running for years (although moved from a dedicated machine to a VM a bit over a year ago), solid as a rock. Confluence is running on the same VM.

One of the bits of infrastructure I never have to worry about.

edit: never tried any of their other products however. We use Pulse by Zutubi for continuous builds.

Do you have ~100 developers using it and 1000s of issues? Definitely does not scale.

That's nonsense. I've used it on projects much (MUCH!) bigger than that.

You didn't try and use it with the built in database or something did you?

For a public example, https://issues.apache.org currently has 209560 issues, thousands of users and it works fine.

...until you plug Greenhopper in.

919 Active Developers, 118,460 Issues. MySQL Backend.

#1 rule of Jira is make sure you have enough memory to keep the mySql Database in cache. The attachments don't matter so much.

What I love about the (Lucene?) index is that I can still do a free text search of all 118,000 issues in under 1 second, the same as I was able to when there were only 100 issues. Plus, the 4.x JQL (kind of a simplified Sql Variant) makes it easy to do ludicrously complex searches that still return in basically O(1) time.

DavidU - tell me a bit more about your trouble with Jira Scaling - was it case of the backend system not having enough memory? Jira isn't really disk speed limited, so that's about the only thing that could cause you problems.

Did you get a chance to run the typical performance tools to see if you were CPU, IO, or Memory Bound?

We use Jira in a 1GB VM with Postgres.

No issues.

It is indeed interesting. Thanks for your report. I genuinely wish I'd had your experience.

If you can spare the time, I'd love a more complete report of your issues with our products and support. If you can email me on scott@atlassian.com, I'd love to hear your story and see if there is anything we can do to improve things.

Thanks - I will do that today.

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