JIRA JVM Memory

[Ailah Aujero]

We have increased our JVM memory to 742 mb. After a couple of weeks of activity it starts to lose memory and sticks at around 15% available memory and does not increase even after forcing a garbage collection. The only thing to resolve this is to restart the JIRA service. Is this a normal practice? Should we be making a habit of restarting the JIRA service from time to time to prevent a memory leak with the JIRA JVM? Or is the recommendation to bump the JVM memory up even higher?

[Ken]

Hmm well we have about 65 projects (with anywhere from 100 issues to 3k), just passed 1000 users, but our custom fields are about maybe ~35ish.

We have about six 3rd party plugins. Our usuage usually hangs around 400ish active HTTP sessions.

FYI we are running 4.4.1 with an eye to upgrade to 5 this monday.

[Ken]

I have nearly the same amount for 'Total' and mine regularly sits around ~20% with no ill effects. Are you seeing slow downs or some other behaviour that is making you worried?

Generally I dont even bother to look at the JVM memory usuage stats unless there is something that is misbehaving in the logs.

FYI theres a neat Java Melody plugin that gives you ganglia like graphs for jira.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

I would increase the memory to 1.5G and see how the performance is.

[Ailah Aujero]

Thank you all for your helpful feedback!

@Jobin - we have roughly 35 projects each with atleast around 200 issues each. Roughly around 300 custom fields. Usage is heavy, we have around 200 user sessions at a time all throughout the day and roughly 650 user accounts in JIRA. And maybe around 15 custom and 3rd party plugins configured.

@Kenneth - Thank you for the plugin recommendation. There was an occasion where the available memory stuck around 2% and then completely froze and brought JIRA down. Yesterday when it was stuck around 15% I noticed a bit of degradation in the performance yesterday but nothing major. The logs looked fine.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

Depends on lot of things like your usage. How many issues, project, custom fields do you have? And also, how many plugins you have?

742MB is quite low and it won't hurt to make it to 1G. However all the parameters, together, decides the actual settings!