[dalrympm]

I'm curious, I'm a Cloud customer and I can tell you that the service is incredibly slow even for a small scale setup (2 Jira Projects and 3 Confluence Workspaces). There's an insane amount of network requests seemingly for mouse tracking. By telling everyone here, that Atlassian Cloud products are insufferably slow, am I violating the ToS?

I was actually thinking about doing a write up on the issues I've had but this seems to make me think I should do so AFTER I find someplace else to go. Right now GitHub is the likely destination but would love to hear other suggestions.

[isodev]

JetBrains recently announced Space and it looks pretty cool (and fast): https://www.jetbrains.com/space/

[foepys]

Currently cloud-only but an on-premises version has been announced. So while Atlassian goes cloud-only, Jetbrains is going in the other direction.

[dalrympm]

I'm a heavy JetBrains user but I've found their server side offerings to be lacking. I haven't been a fan of YouTrack in the past but maybe it's time to give them another try.

[benbristow]

Looks interesting, like a JetBrains Azure DevOps/VSTS.

[isodev]

Yes, they are going for a “all in one” including project and team org functions, source control etc. I’ve been using it for pet projects since the beta.

[fullstackwife]

"looks cool and fast" - DMC DeLorean ?

[confluence_perf]

Sorry to hear it's been a frustrating experience. I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better. Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ?

(edit: looks like HN is severely limiting my reply rate so apologies for delays)

We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number of network calls and such, because while the latter is correlated, the former (frustrating slow experiences) is really the bar and the higher priority.

In terms of the ToS I'm not from legal so can't say (still looking into it), but have definitely had conversations with users on public forums about performance issues, and afaik no one has been accused of violating their ToS.

(edit: since I can't reply due to HN limits I'll try to add some stuff in this edit)

------- @plorkyeran "target things that are easier to fix than those with highest impact" -> this is a good point and something we're trying to do. Engineers know the former (easier to fix) pretty readily, but identifying "highest impact" requires some work, so I'm (as a PM) always trying to find out. It's of course some combination of these two (low hanging fruit, high impact items) that forms the priority list.

------ @igetspam (moved followup into a reply to trigger notification)

------@core-questions "perf to take over company for 6mo-1yr" I'm not in the position to make that level of decisions, but can certainly pass the feedback up the chain. The perf team is trying their best though, so any info anyone can provide us can help us apply our resources in the right place

[michaelt]

I did a test for you just now. I have 100Mbps internet, 32GB RAM, 4ghz i7 processor and suchlike. To make it easy for Jira, I'm doing this at a weekend, late at night, during the new years holiday so the servers shouldn't be busy.

On a cloud-based classic software project (which has less than 200 issues) opening a link to an issue it takes 4.8 seconds for the page to complete rendering and the progress bar at the top of the screen to disappear.

Opening a Kanban board with 11 issues displayed? 4.2 seconds for the page to load.

Click an issue on the board? 2.5 seconds for the details to pop up.

Close that task details modal - literally just closing a window? 200 milliseconds. Not to load a page - just to close a modal!

In case I'm being hard on cloud Jira by insisting on using a classic project, I also checked with a 'Next-gen software project' with less than 2000 issues.

I click a link to view a particular comment on an issue. 4.8 seconds until the issue, comment and buttons have all loaded.

I choose to view a board? 9.9 seconds from entering the URL to the page load completing.

I'm viewing the board and I want to view a single issue's page. I click the issue and the details modal pops up - and just as I click on the link to the details, the link moves because the epic details have loaded, and been put to the left of the link I was going for, causing me to click the wrong thing. So this slow loading is a nontrivial usability problem.

View a single issue, then click the projects dropdown menu. The time, to display a drop-down menu with three items? 200 milliseconds.

This is what people mean when they say the performance problems are everywhere - viewing issues, viewing boards, viewing comments, opening dropdowns, closing modals? It's all slow.

And if you imagine a backlog grooming meeting that involves a lot of switching back and forth between pages and updating tickets? You get to wait through a great many of these several-second pageloads.

[lmilcin]

See, the irony of this is that you are just publicly sharing performance numbers which undeniably show a pattern of performance issues. It also doesn't seem to be possible without you first accepting ToS.

Ooops!

[gregmac]

What are they doing to do? Shut down your instance and force you to switch to a different product....? Hmmmm

[dekhn]

Certainly there are providers who would immediately begin license renegotiation with the thread of termination. It's bad business in the modern era because somebody will just tweet out the renegotiation terms and the licensors don't want to be streisanded.

[sebastien_b]

> Certainly there are providers who would immediately begin license renegotiation with the thread of termination

Oracle comes to mind.

[launderthis]

who says this is an "issue" its just numbers. If you think its an issue thats your interpretation. For instance I used jira for communicate with my team about 3 projects and it only took me 3 hours.

Maybe this person is writing a fiction story where the protagonist is using Jira and they are detailing how they spend their day.

Its like a John Steinbeck novel

[ric2b]

> who says this is an "issue" its just numbers. If you think its an issue thats your interpretation.

No, this is a quote from the comment:

"This is what people mean when they say the performance problems are everywhere - viewing issues, viewing boards, viewing comments, opening dropdowns, closing modals? It's all slow."

[lmilcin]

May I point you to the title of this submission?

"Atlassian Cloud ToS section 3.3(I) prohibits discussing performance issues"

No sane judge would agree with your interpretation.

[captaincrisp]

The actual text says that you can't "publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products". So no interpretation required; posting the stats is enough.

[akersten]

No sane judge would accept that that is a valid clause in a ToS.

[texasbigdata]

Are you allowed to say “use another app”? Or no?

[confluence_perf]

Hi michaelt,

Thank you for the numbers -> I agree these are slow, and I can guarantee you that the Jira team is working on it (though I can't talk about details). These numbers are definitely outside of the goals.

I appreciate the call out of "page to complete rendering and the progress bar at the top of the screen to disappear" and "until the issue, comment and buttons have all loaded". In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s (everything drawn, everything interactive), but working our way down to that will take time.

We're currently looking at each use case to understand the '(a) paint faster vs (b) interactive faster' tradeoff and trying to decide which cases the user has a better experience with (a) or (b). In Confluence this is clearer in some places than in others, but in Jira it's less clear I think (I work on Confluence, I probably shouldn't speak for Jira specifics).

It always comes down to a limitation of resources though, which is why we're always hoping to get as specific feedback as possible.

[BillinghamJ]

> In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s

It's important you understand that "everything loading in <1s" would still be unacceptably slow - that is still an order of magnitude too slow.

That is not "a dream world" - not even close. A well built tool like this, meeting standard expectations (i.e. table stakes), would hit <50ms for the end user - the vast majority of the time. A "dream world" would be more like 10ms.

You should be targeting <200ms for 99% of user-facing interactions. That is the baseline standard/minimum expected.

This is why people are saying the company needs to make a major shift on this - you're not just out of the ballpark of table stakes here, you're barely in the same county!

It cannot be overstated how far off the mark you are here. There's a fundamental missetting of expectations and understanding of what is acceptable.

[fphhotchips]

Do you have evidence that what you're asking for is possible? I'd be interested to see websites that hit the benchmark that you're aiming for.

I just tested a HN profile page (famously one of the lightest weight non-static websites) and it takes between 300ms and 600ms to load. I'm not saying that Jira can't improve, but if HN isn't hitting 250ms then I think telling the Jira guys that nothing less than <200ms is the minimum standard is unrealistic.

[Too]

Look at github pull requests. It loads in under 200ms for me. And is vastly more complex than HN, both in sense of queries and UI, content should be equivalent of what Jira needs.

Jira is also much more interactive than HN. You are sitting 10+ people in a room with some half asleep scrum master opening the wrong issue, have to go back and open the correct one, search again for some related issue you though was fixed last month. Refresh the board to make sure you didnt forget to fill in one field so it ends up in the wrong column, etc etc.

1 sec per click in a situation like this is a joke, and that's just their goal. Reality is 4sec+ as OP mentioned, often even more.

[ZephyrBlu]

200ms for user interactions is different to a 200ms page load.

A 200ms page load is incredibly fast.

Still, I tested your profile page on Google PageSpeed and it came out at a 300ms load time.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

[confluence_perf]

Hi BillinghamJ,

You're right, I apologize for not being clear. We're targeting 1s for "Initial loads" on new tabs/new navigation, which I assume you're referring to. Our target for 'transitions' is different.

If however the numbers you're referring to are "initial load" numbers, then I'm not sure.

(edit: and action responses again are also a separate category. Our largest number of complaints are about 'page load times' in Confluence, so most conversations center around that)

[petters]

Initial loads should definitely be be <100ms as well.

But Jira currently is so slow that 1s would be a great improvement. I am using it at work and regret it, unfortunately.

[BillinghamJ]

As a first step, 1s would be better than nothing for sure, but you need to be working towards a much tighter goal on a 1-2 year timeframe.

New load, you should really be hitting 200ms as your 95th percentile - 300ms or so would be decent still. "Transitions" should hit 100ms 95th, 150ms would be decent.

If you did hit 100ms across the board, you'd be rewarded by your customers/users psychologically considering the interactions as being effectively instantaneous. So it really is worth setting a super high bar as your target here (esp given you need a bit of breathing room for future changes too).

[launderthis]

no dont give into this guy ... this is done over the net. The rate of transfer has to be taken into account. Unacceptable is a measure of comparison.

Unacceptable to who, you have a faster provider for cheaper, with as many features???

Im pretty sure he doesnt because if he could he would go there. There are tradeoffs and Atlassian has many project they are working on. They understand that there is room for improvement in performance. Its one of Atlassian's priorities, it is a tech company (a pretty good one I would say).

I guess one question is about server redundancy. Where is this guy loading from and where is the server he is loading from? Getting things below 1s is nearing the speed of the connection itself. Also at that speed there is deminishing returns. Something that happens at 1s vs .5s doesnt make you twice as fast when you dont even have the response time to move your mouse and click on the next item in .5s.

Sometimes techies just love to argue. You are doing great Atlassian and have tons of features. But maybe it is time to revisit and refactor some of your older tools.

[NicoJuicy]

> A "dream world" would be more like 10ms.

A gateway solely adds 50 ms. So I'm not really sure where you get your numbers/benchmarks from... They are unrealistic

[BillinghamJ]

What gateways have you been using?! That's a long, long way off on the modern internet. Assuming you mean gateways as in the lines you'd see on a traceroute, more typical might be ~2-5ms on a home router, ~0.5-1.0ms upstream.

[jabberwcky]

I hate to pile on a thread where you're already taking a lot of flack, but this point is really important to the future of Atlassian:

> In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s (everything drawn, everything interactive),

As a contractor, I have more or less walked out of or refused interviews on discovering Atlassian toolset was in use. It's not because I hate your tooling (it is visually nice and very featureful), it's because the culture that delivered this software is antithetical to anything I look for in a software project I want to use or contribute to. How can I possibly do my job to any degree of satisfaction when I'm tracking work in a tool that requires 15 seconds between mouse clicks? That is the reality of Jira, and as a result I refuse to use it, or work for people who find that acceptable, because it's a "broken window" that tells me much more about the target environment than merely something about suboptimal bug trackers.

Your page budget should be 100ms max, given all your tools actually do are track a couple of text fields in a pleasing style. Whoever the architecture astronauts are at Atlassian that created the current mess, flush them out, no seat is too senior -- this is an existential issue for your business.

[cyberpunk]

Hmmm. I mean. I'm a contractor too, and I share your pain, but ... I'm really impressed you walk out of paid work because of the issue tracker your client uses.. It sounds a bit like they dodged a bigger bullet than you did tbh mate.

All these systems suck. You learn to live with them, for me I do this:

Everything goes in OmniFocus, I have a keyboard shortcut to create a task that takes <1sec, hit enter twice and it's stored. Twice a day I go though all the tasks I entered this way, and I either mark them done or assign them to various projects/tags/labels I have setup on OmniFocus.

15 mins before I finish work for the day at a client, I update whatever ticket system they use (mostly Jira, but also sometimes even worse things like servicenow) and also whatever enterprise crapware my agency uses (usually some sap based bollocks).

The last 15 mins suck. But it's part of the deal. I can't imagine how strongly you feel to turn down contractor rates due to a ticket system.. I mean, come on?

Edit: Also - btw -- if you're on a Mac the app-store 'fat-app' version of Jira is about 10x better than using the web interface, I suggest you give it a try.

[jabberwcky]

If you turned up to interview, or even worse, arrive at a client site, and they hand you a mouldy 80386 to work from, and point you to the basement, would you feel comfortable?

Jira is the mouldy 80386, and the client's culture is that basement where such things belong. I can't see how this is even being precious. I can find solid work on good teams with smart people anywhere, there is no reason I need to work in a basement permanently damaging my lungs.

Lame analogy, I know, but it's close enough.

[samb1729]

> I'm really impressed you walk out of paid work because of the issue tracker your client uses.. It sounds a bit like they dodged a bigger bullet than you did tbh mate.

> I can't imagine how strongly you feel to turn down contractor rates due to a ticket system.. I mean, come on?

It may be the case that they are in such high demand they have practically free choice of work. That's how I interpreted it, at least.

[texasbigdata]

You’re tooling seems...impressive? Assuming you had 2 projects that paid the same why in the WORLD would you eat 1 to 1.5 hours of that a week? Seems soul crushing and demotivating, but, props to you for not being a fair weather sailor and just getting it done. Actually kinda cool how resourceful your solution is.

[BillinghamJ]

> Your page budget should be 100ms max, given all your tools actually do are track a couple of text fields in a pleasing style

Yeah although it doesn't exactly help in figuring out how to resolve, I think this can be a good grounding in what the product fundamentals actually are and figuring out which over-engineering of those fundamentals is translating into speed problems

I often feel that product people view this type of problem in the wrong way - when you're starting at 5-10s, little incremental A/B tested tweaks are not going to get you down to 50-100ms. A 100x diff requires you to rethink from first principles - it's impossible to get there otherwise

Of course this is also why incumbents get disrupted by startups!

[orangecat]

Hopefully this demonstrates that the anti-performance-discussion ToS clause is harmful not only to your customers but to you as well. You're getting useful information here only because some people are willing to openly violate it.

[Judgmentality]

Not to mention the reputational damage from people asking "why the hell is this in the contract in the first place?"

It says they're so afraid of the quality of their product they'd rather litigate their customers than fix their product.

[dane-pgp]

I wonder if these should be called "Streisand clauses", because it seems that the net effect will be for people to increasingly associate Atlassian with badly performing software.

Certainly if someone asked me what I know about Atlassian, this would now be one of the first things that come to mind.

[magicalhippo]

> In a dream world of course, everything would load in < 1s (everything drawn, everything interactive), but working our way down to that will take time.

FWIW our on-prem install uses <1s for opening issues, running a search etc. Too bad that's a dream world you've decided should no longer be...

[samb1729]

I’m relatively sure it’s the lack of several host to host hops in the network requests that makes an on-prem install so much faster. The way Atlassian’s hosted services handle requests is mind-bogglingly awful and necessitates several round trips per request a lot of the time. It’s just poor architecture on their end.

We’re talking 3-5 redirects for some things they could just proxy on their backend. It’s dumb and there’s no amount of hardware or bandwidth a client can throw at the problem to fix it.

[magicalhippo]

This should be quite glaring in any performance metrics collected though, shouldn't it?

I mean, I don't do web stuff (yet) but I can't imagine it's that difficult to figure out where several seconds get spent.

[jerf]

"'(a) paint faster vs (b) interactive faster'"

It is only a tradeoff if you're at the Pareto optimality frontier [1] for those two things.

I seriously doubt that you are. You should absolutely be able to have more of both.

I would recommend to you personally two things: Open the debugger, and load a page with an issue on it in any environment. Look at the timeline of incoming resources, not just for how long the total takes but also all the other times. You will learn a lot if you haven't done this yet. It will be much more informative than anything we can tell you.

Second, once an issue is loaded, right click on almost anything in the page (description, title, whatever) and select "Inspect Element". Look at how many layers deep you are in the HTML.

I also find it useful to Save the Web Page (Complete) once it's all done rendering, then load it from disk with the network tab loaded in the debugger. It can give a quick & dirty read on how much time it takes just to render the page, separate from all network and server-side code issues.

I have a bit of a pet theory that a lot of modern slowdown on the web is simply how much of the web is literally dozens and dozens of DOM layers deep in containers that are all technically resizeable (even though it is always going to have one element in it, or could be fixed in some other simple way), so the browser layout engine is stressed to the limit because of all the nested O(n) & O(n log n) stuff going on. (It must not be a true O(n^2) because our pages would never load at all, but even the well-optimized browser engines can just be drowned in nodes.) I don't have enough front-end experience to be sure, but both times I took a static snapshot of a page for some local UI I had access to that was straight-up 2+ seconds to render from disk, I was able to go in and just start slicing away at the tags to get a page that was virtually identical (not quite, but close enough) that rendered in a small fraction of a second, just with HTML changes.

My guess is that fixing the network issues will be a nightmare, because the 5 Whys analysis probably lands you at Conway's Law around #4 or #5. But, assuming you also have a client-side rendering issue (I don't use JIRA Cloud (yet) but I can vouch that the server product does), you may be able to get some traction just by peeling away an engineer to take a snapshot of the page and see what it takes to produce a page that looks (nearly) identical but renders more quickly. That will not itself be a "solution" but it'll probably provide a lot of insight.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22889975

[confluence_perf]

I guess I meant that in a more general sense: prioritization is always about tradeoffs, and sometimes you're improving one (paint faster) or improving the other (interactive faster), sometimes both, sometimes trading off one versus the other.

We have looked into the network issues and some of it is similar to what you stated, we do have a known minimum given our chosen cloud infrastructure (separate from our software performance) - we obviously recognize we're not at that limit yet either though.

I have not tried what you mentioned above (load from disk), but I will give it a shot -> it may also give us a clue on how to make our performance testing lower variance, come to think of it......

(apologies for slow replies, HN is still throttling me due to downvotes)

[davb]

That tallies with the experience I had using Jira cloud a few years ago. It sounds like it's still a great case study in how not to architect an issue tracker.

[plorkyeran]

Literally everything? I don't think I could give an example of something which isn't frustratingly slow in Jira. It doesn't need targeted fixes to specific things; if I successfully made a list of the ten biggest offenders and they were all magically fixed tomorrow I don't think it'd appreciably change the experience of using Jira because the next 90 would still be awful.

When faced with long-tail performance problems, it's often better to target the things which are easier to fix rather than the highest impact fixes. Making 20 relatively low-impact things faster can easily be better than improving 10 individually high impact things.

[pluc]

It seriously makes you wonder whether they even use it internally, because not acknowledging or fixing those issues while pretending you have a fast system doesn't make sense.

[hadrien01]

They use the on-premises version, which is much faster: https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

[Judgmentality]

If that's true, the fact that they aren't dogfooding their own product makes me 100% confident they will fail.

I'm actually going to look into shorting Atlassian now.

[uuuugh]

What the guy above said is not true. Jira Cloud uses Jira Cloud to manage their projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY91A_4Mbts

[marmaduke]

Yep, and from a demo of YouTrack (from JetBrains), I got the opposite impression: it’s streamlined just the way a developer would want, keyboard shortcuts and all.

[dmitriid]

Youtrack still somtimes comes up some very weird shortcuts :) https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-19706

[ratww]

> Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ? [...] We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number of network calls

It's not really a problem with a certain page or a certain action: it's a systemic issue, that can only be solved with a systemic change.

This has come up before here in HN [1]. From my point of view, ignoring the issue around number of calls/performance and all feedback regarding it is the root cause for the slowness.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818907

[confluence_perf]

Hi ratww,

Thank you for reiterating this point, and I'll try to shed some light on this. We actually are working on systemic changes to try to make this lighter/better but I can't talk about specifics until the feature is available.

On the other hand, any level of specificity is great, for example: 1) full page loads are slower and more annoying than Transitions (or, vice versa) 2) loading Home page is slower and more annoying than Search Results (or, vice versa) 3) waiting for the editor to load is more annoying than X/Y/Z 4) etc....

Even systemic changes require individual work for applying to these different views, so any level of specific feedback would be helpful.

(also it looks like HN is limiting my reply rate so apologies for any slowness)

[lostdog]

Dear Esteemed Colleague at Atlassian,

I also use Confluence and JIRA regularly, and can confirm that they are the slowest most terrible software that I use on a regular basis. Every single page load and transition is slow and terrible.

Asking "which one is the highest priority" is like asking which body part I'd least prefer you amputate. The answer is: please don't amputate any of them.

It's as if I asked you to dig out a hole for pouring foundation for a house. The answer to "which shovelfull of dirt has the highest priority" is all of them. Just start shoveling. It's not done until you've dug the entire hole.

It's like the exterminator asking which specific cockroach is bothering me the most. (It's Andy. Andy the cockroach is the most annoying one, so please deal with her first).

What I, and many many other commenters, are trying to tell you is that the entire product is slow and terrible (not your fault. I'm guessing you're new and just trying to improve things, and I hope you succeed!). If it were a building, I'd call it a teardown. If it were a car, I'd call it totaled.

It doesn't matter what page or interaction you start with. Just start shoveling.

[confluence_perf]

Hi lostdog,

Thanks for the understanding! Indeed I haven't been at Atlassian that long, but that's not a good excuse: it's my problem to own.

I appreciate the reinforcement of "fix everything", and I assure you we're trying our best to do so. As a PM it is my natural instinct (and literal job) to prioritize, so I'm always looking for more details to do so.

I can understand that my request for details can imply that I'm either not listening or not believing the feedback, but that is not the case -> I do understand everything is slow and needs fixing.

[throw_jirauser]

This is a throwaway since I use Jira/Confluence at work and am not authorized to officially speak on their behalf.

We are actively looking for other solutions outside of Atlassian, specifically because the demands to switch to your cloud offerings. We simply do not trust your cloud.

We also have a higher compliance requirement, since we can have potential snippets of production data. Our Jira/Confluence systems are highly isolated inside a high compliance solution. We can verify and prove that these machines do not leak.

The Atlassian cloud is completely unacceptable in every way possible. And going from $1200ish year to $20000 per year with data center is laughably horrendous - for the same exact features.

Unless Atlassian changes its direction, your software is that of the walking dead. We have a absolute hard timelimit of 2024, but in reality, 2022. We'd like to still use it and pay you appropriately, but we're not about to compromise our data security handling procedures so you can funnel more people into a cloud service... And judging by the comments here, is pretty damn terrible.

[skrap]

If you want to make performance a feature, you need to (in order!)

* define a metric

* measure it automatically with every commit

* define a success threshold

* make changes to get yourself under the threshold

* prohibit further changes which bring you above the threshold

Just do it like that for pretty much every view in the system.

[confluence_perf]

As recommended by another poster to take advantage of the technical community here, I have one question and one comment if you can provide more insights:

question a) My understanding is that performance numbers fluctuate a LOT, even at sampling in the tens of thousands. Do you have any recommendations of tools or methods to reduce this variance?

comment b) we're definitely trying to do this but we're not there yet - most of our metrics don't meet goals we set. Instead the blocking goals must be 'don't make it any worse', which is doable -> but it doesn't necessarily make anything better yet (thus all the questions about what is most annoying that we can fix first).

Hopefully point (b) is clear - I'm not saying "our performance is great/good/acceptable", just the best I can do (as a PM) is try to figure out what to prioritize to fix.

[lostdog]

The high variance is another problem. Good software has low variance in performance. Especially if you're sampling in the tens of thousands.

The high variance does give you two tactical problems. First, how do you keep performance from getting worse? Typically you would set a threshold on the metrics, and prevent checking in code that breaks the threshold. With high variance you clearly cannot do this. Instead, make the barrier soft. If the performance tests break the threshold, then you need to get signoff from a manager or senior engineer. This way, you can continue to make coding progress while adding just enough friction that people are careful about making performance worse.

The second problem of high variance is showing that you're making progress. However, for you, this isn't a real problem. You're not talking about cutting 500 microseconds off a 16 millisecond frame render. You need to cut 5-25 second page loads down by a factor of 10 at least. There must be dozens of dead obvious problems taking up seconds of run time. Is Confluence's performance so atrocious that you couldn't statistically measure cutting the page load time in half?

[texasbigdata]

It’s absolutely baffling for one of the leading tooling providers in the software development cycle they do not have internal competency to...track if their tool actually works or performs, and beyond that they didn’t proactively reach out to customers to at least get verbal direct knowledge while the telemetry was stood up.

Instead they “prioritized” a legal change in the ToS.

[igetspam]

Know what would be great? Markdown support. The WYSIYG is full of bad assumptions and has been forever. In the beginning, we could at least opt out but that's long gone. I actively encourage companies I consult for to use anything but confluence because it seems to be designed specifically for the lowest common denominator with no allowance for people who work faster with a keyboard.

[freedomben]

Yes, agreed. I get that confluence is supposed to be for everybody, not just programmers, but there are plenty of great WYSIWYG implementations that use markdown under the hood (and make that accessible). If I could clone the underlying git repo (or an abstraction or something) like Gollum allows, I'd advocate for confluence everywhere. As it stands now I advocate for either markdown/asciidoc in the code, or gitlab wiki (which allows doing that).

[confluence_perf]

followup questions: what level of support are you looking for, and what would be sufficient?

1) markdown macro (limits markdown to the body content, and not interacting with other macros or styling)

2) copy/paste markdown -> autoconvert to WYSIWYG (limits markdown to copy/pasting, so no editing Markdown inside)

3) "markdown pages" (something like 'this page is Markdown only, no WYSIWYG)

I make no comments/promises on any of these becoming real but looking for what's most valuable

[epage]

Not who you are respondin to but some thoughts

1. Don't be Slack / Teams :)

What I mean by this is if you support it, support it correctly rather than "markdown as keyboard shortcuts" that some products do where if you make the simplest of editing changes, your "markdown" isn't recognized.

2. Devs want to consistently use Markdown across their entire suite

At my last job, we were switching to Azure DevOps. They support Markdown in the developer workflow (PRs) but rich-text-only for Tasks (to be non-dev friendly?).

At my current job, I'm involved in developer productivity and have been interviewing people to collect input for where we want to take development. We currently use Phabricator which uses Remarkup. This is a source of frustration because its not quite the markdown they use everywhere else.

From these, I'm thinking Markdown Pages would be the top choice since it allows developer-only interactions and marketing-only interactions to stay within what they are comfortable with,

[confluence_perf]

Thanks for the detail! Point (1) is very interesting

on (2) -> it sounded like you're saying (a) 'across entire suite identically is good', but that also (b) 'if there's a clear separation of Dev vs nonDev apps/docs, having different support is okay', did I read that right? please correct me if wrong.

[nickdonnelly]

The correct answer here: use the same editor in the entire suite, everywhere. Give the user a setting to decide if they want that editor to be WYSIWYG, or markdown.

In my personal opinion, Atlassian's rich text editor (or, seemingly, the 4-6 different one's you guys have built) is unforgivably terrible, so true markdown is the way to go if having both isn't an option.

[saagarjha]

As a programmer, being able to have something like what GitHub does (Markdown text, you can preview what the rendered version looks like) would be great. I assume that people who are less technical would like a more WYSIWYG editor but as long as the ability to write straight Markdown is there I am sure that I wouldn’t care. Oh, and make sure it’s actually a reasonable subset of Markdown, not like Discord or Slack where you support bold and italics but mot much else.

[confluence_perf]

Thanks! I'm not sure this is the most doable thing (I'm not familiar with the technical aspects of the editor storage format) but can definitely discuss with that team.

The "reasonable subset of Markdown" is also a very useful specific detail, exactly the kind of specificity that helps us do our jobs.

[Kinrany]

There's CommonMark, a standard for Markdown. You could make that your goal, instead of feature parity with any of the proprietary implementations like Github.

[TeMPOraL]

FWIW, check out the new Reddit interface. For all the well-deserved hate it's getting (some of which for the same reasons Jira is), it showcases that you can have a dual WYSIWYG/Markdown editor that works, and allows switching back and forth between modes during editing.

[chrisseaton]

Just normal Markdown for all edit fields! GitHub manages to have a single (almost) Markdown format everywhere. Could we have that in all Atlassian products. There’s no need for your own format.

[SaladFork]

The biggest request I have of JIRA aside from performance is that whatever markdown/markup language you choose, that it be consistent across the entire product.

It is so frustrating to have to remember to use double-curlies for inline code/pre sometimes, and backticks other times. In each case, the other doesn't work. More than once using one has resulted it rendering correctly on the immediate page but not on the next.

This is one I encounter regularly but is far from the only inconsistency in support.

[rhencke]

How does this relate to the performance issues being discussed?

[runlevel1]

In the case of Confluence specifically, it makes the cost of experimentation a lot steeper.

Confluence's WYSIWYG editor will often make changes that can't be reversed with "undo" -- especially those involving indentation. Copy-paste frequently screws up its formatting as well.

So if you don't want to risk losing lots of work, you have to make many smaller changes. With each change taking a few seconds, it adds up quickly.

If it was markdown or some extended set of it, that wouldn't be a problem.

[confluence_perf]

We're trying to collect and fix such occurrences, so if you have something with specific repro steps please send them to me and I'll make sure they get to the right team.

[runlevel1]

The WYSIWYG editor makes it extremely difficult to give repro steps because formatting information is hidden from the user and is not perfectly preserved during copy-paste.

More generally, the issues I see reported only ever seem to be fixed in the Cloud version. I currently have to use the Data Center version.

Why go through the trouble of reporting an issue I'll never see fixed involving a feature that I loathe using?

[MandieD]

I always write my stuff in Word first, then paste into Confluence.

[runlevel1]

I do that too when creating a new page.

Editing an existing page is more perilous. I sometimes write out my changes in plaintext first, and then paste and format it into the doc piece by piece. Even that can get janky, though.

It's like Confluence is punishing my attempts to write documentation.

[freedomben]

Not GP, but I'd say because it's heavy, and if you didn't have to use it (as there are alternative methods) then you don't pay the performance penalty.

[etimberg]

Half the UI uses textile and half the UI uses Markdown. Shipping two parsers & renderers for the app makes it a lot bigger.

[ratww]

Don't know if that's what OP was thinking, but a WYSIWYG editor is normally slower than a plaintext editor, so it could make the product more bearable.

[core-questions]

> Would you be willing to share more specifics,

You've got to be kidding me. Have you used your own product? Going from my carefully tuned Server install to cloud Jira or Confluence is a night-and-day difference. The Cloud product is virtually unusable in comparison for any heavy Jira user.

You don't need "specifics", you need your performance engineering team to literally take over the entire company for 6 months to a year. No new features - nobody fucking needs them, the features 99% of your users use have been in the product for 5+ years already. Whatever you're PM'ing, cancel it, it's a waste of time in comparison to making the product not suck. The biggest source of losing users to some other product is going to be the sheer pain of continuing to use Atlassian....

Just make it usable. Halve the number of requests. Cache more things client-side. Do more server-side pre-processing so that a round-trip is not needed when I click on a menu.

I'm not looking forward to when I am forced to migrate my users to a more expensive and less performant experience. I and hundreds of thousands of other administrators will be experiencing months of user complaints because of the forced migration as it is; this is Atlassian's real chance to make it suck less in time.

[miken123]

> Would you be willing to share more specifics

That's something you could easily figure out yourself. E.g., just grabbing some random JIRA:

https://hibernate.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/HV/...

Opening an issue in that tracker takes 24 seconds for me. Twenty-four.

[deathweasel]

9s to load that page. 3s just for `jira/software/c/projects/HV/issues/?filter=allissues`, which is 194 lines of HTML (with some scripts) but the bulk of the 3s is just content loading.

Wow.

[jiggawatts]

Scroll up and down in the list.

They polyfill text!

That's just absurd.

To add a data point, I get 26 seconds on gigabit fibre that is 3 ms network latency away from "hibernate.atlassian.net".

[rswail]

Average of 15s for me, including watching the issue sidebar show a bunch of fields, with "5 more fields" and then refresh and remove that option.

I started using JIRA in 2008. It was faster then.

If this is what the "cloud" version is going to be, then we will be looking for alternatives, even though we're an Aussie company and I would like to be supportive.

As for Confluence, the wiki is just ok. The editor is clumsy and occasionally I have to go into raw HTML just to get highlighting, bolding etc to work.

If Atlassian is going all-in on cloud, then it needs to realize that cloud isn't "run our software, but not on-prem". Just like MYOB had to learn, it needs to be rewritten so that the web front end is streamlined and cached separately to the underlying API.

[NickNameNick]

wow - clicking on an issue in that tracker was terrible. after 3-4 seconds I thought it had finished loading, but then the UI pulled a bunch more stuff in, and it didn't finish loading the image in the issue description - the most important part of the page - until 24.87s.

On 100Mb fiber...

[throw_jirauser]

31.2 seconds, on a not great internet connection (cell)

[X-Istence]

Other commenters have hit on this already, but the worst one that bites me all of the time is this one:

1. I click a link to an issue 2. I need to do something on that issue, so I attempt to click on a particular section to go make a modification 3. Bam, some background script has loaded, some new piece of content was shoved in, and what I clicked wasn't the thing I was expecting to click

Also, certain interactions within JIRA take far too many steps, and each one takes far too long to load, so it makes me dislike JIRA even more.

Project managers love JIRA, but engineers don't, because each time you make us wait we are less inclined to deal with the software that PM's need us to use so they know how things are going, so instead we get more meetings. If JIRA were fast, we could cut down on meetings.

Please make JIRA fast.

[CuriousSkeptic]

> Project managers love JIRA, but engineers don't

I think this is the core issue. It is simply not designed to be useful for developers, it’s designed for managing developers.

It’s the same issue with time reporting tools. The UI for entering data is just there because it needs to, but it’s not the central selling point of the software.

The UX for the data entry is just not designed to solve any problems besides accepting the data required for the reports that are the real product.

[keithnz]

this "trying to show concern" is just fake. Atlassian have a ticket tracking system for their problems. They just ignore so much of the big hard problems, they close tickets with hundreds and hundreds of people on it explaining a multitude of core problems. Coming on HN is just trying to spin it for PR purposes is just not going to work, thread after thread on HN just shows that many many people have been BURNT by Atlassian products. However, I will say, Confluence has improved, but so many things still suck about it, including it being sluggish, and a search that seems really brain dead.

[jiggawatts]

The topic of poor Jira performance came up yesterday, and I did some quick benchmarking of Jira cloud using the best-case scenario for performance: A tiny amount of data, no complex permissions, a commonly used form, no web proxy, no plugins, same geo region as the servers (Sydney), gigabit fibre internet(!), etc...

I spun up a free-tier account and created an empty issue. No data. No history. Nothing in any form fields. As blank as possible.

The only positive aspect is that most of the traffic is coming from a CDN that enables: Gzip, IPv6, HTTP/2, AES-GCM, and TLS 1.3. That's the basics taken care of.

Despite this, reloading the page with a warm cache took a whopping 5.5 seconds. There's an animated progress bar for the empty form!

This required 1.2 MB of uncacheable content to be transferred.

With the cache disabled (or cold), a total of 27.5 MB across 151 files taking 33 seconds is required to display the page. This takes over 5 MB of network traffic after compression. (Note that some corporate web proxies strip compression, so you can't rely on it working!)

For reference, it takes 1.6 seconds on the same computer to start Excel, and 8 seconds to load Visual Studio 2019 (including opening a project). That's four times faster than opening an issue ticket with a cold cache!

Meanwhile, the total text displayed on the screen is less than 1 KB, which means that the page has transfer-to-content efficiency ratio exceeding 1000-to-1. This isn't the animated menu of a computer game, it's a web form!

To render the page, a total of 4.35 seconds of CPU time was required on a gaming desktop PC to with a 3.80 GHz CPU. Having 6-cores doesn't seem to help performance, so don't assume upcoming higher-core CPUs will help in any way.

A developer on an ultraportable laptop running on battery over a WiFi link with a bad corporate proxy server in a different geo-region would likely get a much worse experience. Typically they might get as little as 1.5 GHz and 20 Mbps effective bandwidth, so I can see why people are complaining that Jira page loads are taking 10+ seconds!

In perfectly normal circumstances your customers are likely seeing load times approaching a solid minute.

PS: I do development, and I've avoided Atlassian products primarily because there's been a consistent theme to all discussions related to Atlassian, especially Jira: It's slow.

Stop asking your customers if they're running plugins, or what configuration they're using. Start asking yourself what you've done wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.

[alexott]

And if you are on battery only, with Wi-Fi over tethering, try to find relevant issues to solve problems of your customer... Or trying to file new Jira on the same setup... It’s so painful

[jiggawatts]

In another YC News thread I was confused by people complaining about their text editor or IDE latency, because I've never had that problem with any editor, despite being a gamer and very sensitive to even tens of milliseconds latency.

A lot of people explained that they do development using a Macbook Air on battery. Those are an order of magnitude slower than a plugged in desktop PC. Twenty milliseconds for me is a two hundred milliseconds for them!

Similarly, many outsourced developers are forced to work on cloud VMs that are not only relatively low-spec (1 or 2 cores), but outright throttled, such as the B-series Azure VMs.

Web developers at ISVs like Atlassian are also "spoiled" by having essentially unfettered LAN connectivity with 1-5 millisecond latencies. Worse still, they'll do development with the server component running on their localhost, which is basically cheating.

Real enterprise networks have at least two firewalls between end-users and the Internet, and at least one web proxy, which more than likely supports only TLS 1.2, HTTP 1.1, Gzip, etc...

We have customers that have less Internet uplink bandwidth for 15,000 users than I have for myself at home.

But all of this is immaterial to Jira's performance woes. It's slow in all circumstances. There is no way to make it fast. Not even liquid nitrogen cooled Zen 3 CPUs running at 8 GHz could bring the page load times down to what I would categorise as acceptable.

[TeMPOraL]

> A lot of people explained that they do development using a Macbook Air on battery. Those are an order of magnitude slower than a plugged in desktop PC.

Indeed. This was a surprise for me too on Windows laptops. I think this was a change in the industry's approach to power management that happened some years ago, because I don't remember spotting these issues with the first two laptops that I've used. But in the past few years, input processing latency has became a telltale sign that I'm running on battery, on a "maximize battery life" profile.

[Macha]

It's hard to name a single action I can take in JIRA which does not feel unacceptably slow. However, these are the actions that cause the most issues for me due to being used most often (JIRA datacenter, MBP 2019 with i7 + 32gb ram):

1. Viewing a board. This can take 10+ seconds to load.

2. Dragging an issue from one column to another. This greys out the board, rendering it unreadable and unusable for 5-ish seconds.

3. Editing a field. I get a little spinner before it applies for 2-3s for even the simplest edits like adding a label.

4. Interacting with any board that crosses multiple projects. A single project board is bad enough, as in point 1, but we have a 5 project board that takes 20+ seconds.

Actually, I found an action that's pretty ok: Search results are fast, even if clicking into any of them is not. I'm not sure why rendering a board is so different performance wise.

[confluence_perf]

Thank you so much for the details! This is very helpful. I will pass this along to my Jira Perf colleagues (there's multiple of them, since they know Perf is such a big issue).

Just to clarify on Search though, which search are you talking about:

a) quick search (top bar) b) issue search (the one with the basic/JQL switcher) c) something else

Trying to narrow down the latter "even if clicking into any of them is not" part to understand which view that is

[texasbigdata]

Do you guys not use the tool? How is this news to you? Couldn’t you self generate this issue list by just sitting in a locked room for 45 minutes and writing down everything you know already doesn’t work?

[Macha]

Doesn't Quick Search lead into issue search when you press enter?

I think I mean issue search.

By clicking into them, I mean actually loading the issues is slow.

[TomVDB]

If you honestly need details and specifics when Confluence has always been a slow mess to the point of being unusable, then maybe Atlassian needs a PM in charge of performance metrics first and foremost?

[runlevel1]

Navigation is sluggish across the board in both Confluence and Jira.

Not just the Cloud service, the self-hosted versions are also painfully slow no matter what resources you throw at them.

That makes the other UX issues worse because the feedback loop has so much lag.

[coredog64]

Good news about the self-hosted version being slow: Pretty soon you won’t be able to run self-hosted Atlassian products.

[runlevel1]

Their Data Center version will still be available.[1] That's what we're currently on.

Data Center includes a few performance-related features like being able to run multiple frontends. I think we're running 4 instances right now. It's still really slow, even when nobody else is using it.

[1]: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/server-vs-data-...

[lukeschlather]

I know Jira has always had scaling issues. I used to work for a very large company in the early 2010s that had, I think 5 separate Jira instances. But they were I think dealing with on the order of ten thousand daily active users per instance.

[ratww]

> Navigation is sluggish across the board in both Confluence and Jira.

Also in Bitbucket. It used to be super fast, but recent changes made it very slow.

My team loves the integration with JIRA but we're considering going to Github because of the slowness.

[NickNameNick]

Do it.

Jira's git integration is really poor anyway.

Even redmine is better, where git commits that mention the issue get thier own column in the UI, and they ALL show up there, not just the ones with the comment annotation.

[dalrympm]

@confluence_perf The Cloud applications provide multiple avenues for providing feedback directly in the user interface. Some/many of them are quite invasive (as in part of the screen is taken over with a "rate your experience editing this document"). I have used these avenues to provide feedback many many times over the years with my #1 response always being "focus on the performance". None of those ever get a response and I don't see what reiterating them in a HN post is going to solve. You have the data, please do something with it.

[xtracto]

> Would you be willing to share more specifics, such as: - Pages with content X are the slowest - Trying to do A/B/C is annoyingly slow - etc ?

I would... but Atlassian TOS prohibit me from doing so :(

[still_grokking]

>I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better.

That's the problem. It's beyond repair since many, many years. You can only make it worse.

Ditch it! Throw it away, and rewrite from scratch. If you don't bungle it again (here lies the risk, as we're still talking about Atlassian) you'll have a better product then ever in one year.

[saagarjha]

If you’re being rate limited, try emailing the moderators at [e-mail] and they might be able to help you.

[dmitriid]

I think this answer from two months ago should give all the insight you ever want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818907

And the first answer to your comment in this thread profiling performance for an empty page with almost no data on a small project should give you even more data than you ever would want.

And this one for an empty project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616069

However, having personally experienced "upgrades to Jira and Confluence experiences" over the past few years, I can safely say: no one at Atlassian gives two craps about this. All the talk about "We are definitely working on generalized efforts to make 'most/all/everything' faster" is just that: talk. There's exactly zero priority given to performance issues in lieu of flashy visual upgrades which only make the actual experience worse.

> We're trying to focus on frustrating pages/experiences rather than number of network calls and such, because while the latter is correlated, the former (frustrating slow experiences) is really the bar and the higher priority.

Exactly: you aren't even trying to understand what people are telling you. These metrics you ask for and then dismiss entirely are the primary, core, systemic reason for frustrating slow experiences that you pretend are "high priority". No, frustrating slow experiences have not been a high priority for years (if ever).

If you need to do 200 requests and load 27.5 MB of data to display an empty page, therein lies your problem. You, and other PMs at Atlassian fail to understand these basic things, and yet we get platitudes like "performance is our top priority". It is not. You're good at hiding information and buttons behind multiple layers of clicks, each of which needs another 200 requests and 5-15 seconds to execute.

Oh. You're also good at adding useless crap like this: https://grumpy.website/post/0TcOcOFgL while making sure that your software is nigh unusable: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/888415958821416960 I imagine all performance tickets get dismissed because no one can see the description even on a 5k monitor

[Slackwise]

> I'm a PM for Confluence Cloud and we're always trying to make it better.

Can you guys please make Ctrl-S save and not exit editing? My muscle memory is costing me 10+ seconds of load times every time I type a paragraph and reflexively save, getting dumped back to the view mode of a document. The slow load times exacerbate the problem tremendously. I honestly don't know a single product that treats Ctrl/Cmd-S as "Save and Exit" so this is just a baffling UI/UX design decision.

[confluence_perf]

Hi Slackwise,

This is interesting -> I don't think Ctrl+S should be exiting editing in any form, can you describe this a little bit further? When you hit this is it:

a) moving to Preview (you can see the changes you made, but in preview mode not page view mode (the page tree won't be visible)

b) browser returns to the 'view page' (page tree visible), but your changes are not published (you may see a tag at the top "UNPUBLISHED CHANGES")

c) something else (please describe)

Second question: what does the browser's forward/back buttons display after the 'ctrl+S' result?

[Slackwise]

This isn't the cloud offering, but on-prem. I assume they're the same.

The about page says "Confluence 6.15.2".

When I click "Edit" to edit a page, via `/pages/editpage.action?pageId=`, and hit Ctrl-S, it takes me back to the view mode rendered via `/display/SPACE/Page+Title`.

Absolutely infuriating and wastes an incredible amount of time. I can't get over my muscle memory. The "Save" button in the bottom-right does the same and appears to be what the hotkey activates. No mention of it being a "Save and Quit Editing". Hovering over the button says "Save your page (Ctrl-S)".

[confluence_perf]

Thanks for mentioning that -> honestly I keep forgetting to ask because I work on the Cloud side.

I will see if I can find some server folks to ask around, but obviously can't promise any movement.

[tbodt]

I would say the right place for the performance team to apply resources is looking for bugs or missed optimizations that affect everything or nearly everything on the site. Everything is uniformly slow, so there must be a lot of this.

[pacamara619]

Is this bait?

[samb1729]

Atlassian products in general spray out a huge number of requests to dozens of hostnames for even the most basic of actions. It scares me to think how their organisation is structured internally given the outwardly visible result.

If you’d like to see it for yourself, run Little Snitch in alert mode and try to sign into bitbucket.org - it’s almost comical how many hoops your browser jumps through.

[dreamcompiler]

I'm very curious about where the slowdown is coming from. Is it mostly JS on the client or Java on the server? When I ran my own Confluence server on a Digital Ocean VM, it was slow but not unbearable. I assumed it was Tomcat's fault* or the fact that I wasn't using a "real" database on the backend (a configuration Atlassian frowns upon).

*Confluence is built on Tomcat. Don't know if this is also true for Jira.

Now that my Confluence server is on Atlassian's cloud, it seems much slower still. So I have to assume it's not client-side JS because that hasn't changed much; there's some kind of resource starvation going on with Atlassian's servers.

[deathweasel]

Over here, at least, a lot of the time is spent just waiting for content. Even static content from CDNs. I'm guessing they're not geolocating properly.

See https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-to-swi...

[EdwardDiego]

Tomcat is fast, unless you do slow things synchronously.

[jchook]

Check out Clubhouse.io

I've used many others including Github, GitLab, Phabricator, Redmine, etc., and Clubhouse does a great job IMO.

[bak3y]

My org uses Clubhouse, and it's still slow. Probably not as slow as Jira, but it's a running joke where I work.

[jchook]

Interesting! What size org?

We recently passed 10k stories and it still feels very snappy. Also the UI/UX feels very polished.

[bak3y]

We're barely over 1k employees, and most of those don't use Clubhouse. Not sure how to tell exactly how many stories we have in CH.

[jchook]

You may be able to tell from the ID #

[chrisandchris]

Is there an on-prem version?

[jchook]

Their FAQ[1] says no, but they would like to gauge interest in that feature and to reach-out to their support team.

1. https://help.clubhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/360036047091-Clu...

[texasbigdata]

Doesn't Oracle sue if you benchmark them and release the results publicly or is that an old wives tail?

On a YouTube lecture at CMU the Materialize guys seemed to try very hard to not even land in the same zip code as that discussion to the point it was awkward, and they seem pretty smart.

Are these large organizations really that petty? Ad absurdism, would it be legal if Ford said we couldn’t drag race their car after we bought it?

[vbezhenar]

https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/standard-license.h...

You may not: disclose results of any Program benchmark tests without Oracle’s prior consent

[SigKill9]

If you are looking for a fast alternative, we're building www.kitemaker.co (I'm one of the founders). We're part of the upcoming YC batch, and I'd be happy to help you onboard and import existing projects if needed.

[sharken]

I think future customers would like to know what kind of performance to expect, so a write-up sounds like a great idea.

It sounds like a bad business decision to not support open discussion on performance, it makes me think that they have something to hide.