Whole Jira or BigPicture is slow

Owned by Anna Ciepłota
Last updated: Apr 23, 2024
2 min read

In case of contacting our Support Team via our portal or e-mail for the first time, please remember to:

  • Describe a problem in detail.

  • Collect the required data (described below) and attach it to the request.

  • Provide an exact timestamp when a problem occurred. 

If you have contacted the Atlassian Support Team regarding performance problems and have a preliminary analysis, let us know and add our Support Team to that ticket. 

Problem

You notice low performance throughout the Jira and BigPicture (high usage of server resources, e.g., high CPU usage), or the whole Jira system does not respond.

Required data to collect and send to the Support Team:

You need to generate thread dumps while you are experiencing performance problems. Collecting thread dumps when issues no longer exist is useless.

You can generate thread dumps a few times, as comprehensive data can help our Support Team analyze the problem faster. 

If Jira or BigPicture is unresponsive and you cannot access the App Configuration > Advanced > Technical info page to generate thread dumps, you can create thread dumps using the commands:

For  jstack installed:

  1. When you notice a performance problem, you can Identify the Jira application PID by using a command:

    JIRA_PID=`ps aux | grep -i jira | grep -i java | awk -F '[ ]*' '{print $2}'`;

     

  2. Run the following command - it generates ten snapshots of CPU usage and thread dumps with 10-second intervals for a minute. You must have a JDK installed for the jstack command to work.

    for i in $(seq 10); do top -b -H -p $JIRA_PID -n 1 > jira_cpu_usage.`date +%s`.txt; jstack -l $JIRA_PID > jira_threads.`date +%s`.txt; sleep 10; done



  3. Compress generated jira_cpu_usage.txt and jira_threads.txt files and send them to our Support Team.

No jstack installed:

  1. If you do not have jstack installed, use the following command when you notice a performance problem:
    This command generates ten snapshots of CPU usage and thread dumps with 10-second intervals.

    for i in $(seq 10); do top -b -H -p $JIRA_PID -n 1 > jira_cpu_usage.`date +%s`.txt; kill -3 $JIRA_PID; sleep 10; done

    When "kill -3" is used, the thread dump is sent to the standard error stream. If you run your application in tomcat, the thread dump will be sent into <TOMCAT_HOME>/logs/catalina.out file, which is usually attached to the Jira support zip.

  2. Compress generated jira_cpu_usage.txt files and send them to our Support Team with the Jira support zip file.