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by jiggawatts 1993 days ago
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.

1 comments

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
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.

> 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.