Why should I use limited contexts for an custom field?

[Matt Russell]

More out of curiosity - Is there a technical reason that I should limit a custom field's context to projects / issues rather than just letting it exist against every issue type, and only using Screens to hide / show available fields against a project?

Does it chew up loads of extra memory or something? It's just an additional (complex) layer where things can go wrong when re-using custom field for a different project...

Just curious what business need prompted the capability.

Thanks!

[Jason Plumhoff · Accepted solution]

From what I've read, this can improve performance on very large JIRA instance - but you are unlikely to notice on a typical instance. If you do a search for jira performance tuning, I'm sure you'll find a justification. But I also remember that there are several such optimizations. If you have (or expect to have) an instance with over 100,000 issues, I'd spend some time looking into any optimization that seems practical.

[Matt Russell]

I thought so. And considering the system can be reindexed, it's the kind of thing you can retrofit when performance actually becomes an issue?

Thanks Jason - confirmed a hunch.