Use Symbolic link for relocate JIRA index directory

[Heshan Manamperi]

Guys,

Do you guys use Symbolic links to change the location (out of jira_home directory) of JIRA directories such as caches/index?

Hesh

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Yes, a simple soft link works perfectly.

It's a bit of a pain not being able to relocate these directories in the UI. A common setup is to want the attachments on a disk that's mirrored and backed up, (SAN, shared file system or something) but the index on the fastest nastiest non-shared disk you can find.

[Heshan Manamperi]

Hi Nic,

Is it OK, If I use RAM disk as index directory?

Hesh

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, but there are issues with a simple RAM disk.

First, you might be better off using the RAM allocated to it to run the JVM, and, more importantly, you'll lose your index and need to re-index every time you restart the machine.

[Heshan Manamperi]

Hi Nic,

I have 64GB of RAM in my server and I have alocated 32GB for JVM. SO I guess it will not be a problem if I use RAM disk. Is there any other issues rather than data loose in server restart?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not that I have run into.

You aren't really risking data loss in a restart, but that you'll need to re-index on every reboot. This might be acceptable if your re-index is a matter of a couple of minutes, but if it's starting to run over 2-3 minutes (it's proportional to the number of issues and complexity of customfields), that might not be acceptable to your users.

[Sergey Svishchev]

And you can always save the contents of RAM disk if the restart is a planned one.

[Peter Van de Voorde]

We actually us a soft link for our complete home directory and installation directory. So it works perfectly.

In this way we can use jira-home and atlassian-jira as directories in all our configurations, but in the end they are just soft links to the actual directories. (It's part of our backup and falll back mechanism should an update go awry).