Understanding the pop-up "Page updates have been paused" shown in Bitbucket Data Center

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian apps on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Summary

This page explains the browser pop-up "Page updates have been paused" when Bitbucket is left unattended on the Dashboard, Builds, or Pull request view pages.

Solution

Understanding the new notification

Feature request BSERV-13410 introduced a new property to pause dashboard updates to allow inactive users to be logged out.

How it currently works

The pages Dashboard, Builds, and Pull request view have their own periodic polling mechanism that sends background requests to the server. Those requests are resetting the timer related to the server.session.timeout setting, effectively keeping the session alive permanently until another, much larger timeout defined by server.session.cookie.max-age property is reached. (This property has a default value of two-weeks.)

How the session timeout works

The server.session.timeout setting defines after how many seconds of inactivity a user's session will time out. The default value is 1800 seconds or 30 minutes. However, even when the session times out, users may not be logged out if they selected the option Keep me logged in (setting the "remember-me" token) when authenticating.

Introducing the new parameter

To address this, a new parameter, web.poll.updates.timeout, was introduced. The new parameter web.poll.updates.timeout is set to server.session.timeout by default. After web.poll.updates.timeout seconds of inactivity are reached, web pages will stop sending requests, making it possible for the session timer to reach the timeout set by server.session.timeout.

Available workaround

Some customers may want to retain the old functionality and disable the new notification. To do so, you will need to modify the new property default to have it resume sending background updates from the dashboard pages.

How to apply workaround

  1. Navigate to $BITBUCKET_HOME/shared and open bitbucket.properties.

  2. Insert the following property. If the parameter is set to 0, polling never stops.:

    • web.poll.updates.timeout = 0

  3. Restart Bitbucket to apply the change.

Updated on November 7, 2025

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