New JIRA installs slow on some linux servers

[Pepe]

Lately we've had a few separate instances of JIRA running really slow when we do a fresh install on a new server. These are systems with the a new up to date OS (CentOS 5.6 and Ubuntu <something> are the two we've seen) and we use the JIRA installer. Debugging has shown that java seems to be chewing up tons of processor time even tho the processor should be sufficient and the systems have plenty of ram. All are 64 bit systems (tho we haven't tested 32 bit systems) and we're using the 64 bit installer. I tried installing java on the system rather than using the bundled version that comes with jira but the performance is still poor.

In all cases the target server has been on a client site. We run jira on CentOS 5.4-5.6 on Rackspace Cloud images with no issues and I'm at a bit of a loss for what's going on. Has anyone else reported issues or you have any pointers for what to look for?

I will use a specific client server for the purpose of this support issue. The servers use Xeon procs whereas our rackspace servers use Opterons. I don't think it matters but the only real difference I notice at a glance is the address size (Opteron 2374 HE: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual vs. Xeon E5420: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual).

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm not very experienced with performance tweaks outside Jira, as I've always had the luxury of being able to call on proper java developers/admins/hackers. When I've run into performance issues and not been able to optimise inside Jira, they've asked me for more info. As they start to talk about heap sizes, garbage collection, threading and so on, I've got a bit lost, but if you could provide information on memory settings, that is probably where to start!

Best bet - give us the JVM parameters. All that stuff around -Xmx50m you can get from the "system information" page under admin.

I've only had one problem with Jira and processors - running it on Niagara machines wasn't a good idea. All the other performance problems have been down to config, load or, most importantly, memory allocation/usage/tweaking...