Issue Type Scheme migration on large number of issues causes gateway timeout

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products 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

When changing an Issue Type Scheme on a project, if some of the issue types of issues in the project are no longer covered by the new scheme, then a migration of issue types will occur. If there's a very large number of these issues, then the operation can take a large amount of time, which will cause gateway timeouts when using a reverse proxy. To reproduce:

Environment

Jira prior to 9.3.0.

Diagnosis

  1. Find a project with the order of 100000s of issues in one issue type

  2. Create an issue type scheme that does not include that issue type

  3. Change that project's issue type scheme to the new one not including that issue type, and go through the migration steps

Cause

The URL takes so long to load, we hit the proxy timeout.

Solution

This should be addressed in Jira 9.3.

This workaround may require increasing the maximum number of issues in a bulk operation with the system property jira.bulk.edit.limit.issue.count - note that you may need to test in a staging environment to ensure that the resources consumed by this increase do not cause problems. You may need to perform this in batches rather than all at once, depending on how large the set of issues are that need to be changed.

ℹ️ Please see Advanced Jira Configuration for instructions on how to edit the jira-config.properties file and note that the file may not exist if you have not made customizations.

  1. Create an issue type scheme that contains the full set of issue types from both your original and desired destination state

  2. Assign that issue type scheme to the project

  3. Use a bulk move operation to change the issue type of the affected issues

  4. Now assign the new issue type scheme to the project, without needing to run through the migration

  5. Remove the issue types that are no longer needed.

💡 Sometimes a bulk move is the preferred method (instead of the wizard) for large sets of data as there is more feedback as to potential errors.

See: JRASERVER-63526 - Issue Type Scheme migration on large number of issues causes gateway timeout

Updated on April 8, 2025

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