Performance problems when sorting by custom field

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

Symptoms

The result of searches take long time to complete when sorting by custom field and JIRA instance may run into frequent GCs.

Thread dumps contain com.atlassian.jira.issue.search.parameters.lucene.sort.DocumentSortComparatorSource$InternalFieldComparator which has a refence to a huge com.atlassian.jira.issue.Issue array.:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "http-bio-8090-exec-24" daemon prio=5 tid=7fdb10959800 nid=0x11a0f7000 runnable [11a0ed000] java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE at java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method) at java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:129) ... at com.atlassian.jira.issue.fields.CustomFieldImpl$CustomFieldIssueSortComparator.compare(CustomFieldImpl.java:1974) at com.atlassian.jira.issue.search.parameters.lucene.sort.DefaultIssueSortComparator.compare(DefaultIssueSortComparator.java:37) at com.atlassian.jira.issue.search.parameters.lucene.sort.DocumentSortComparatorSource$InternalFieldComparator.compareBottom(DocumentSortComparatorSource.java:89) at org.apache.lucene.search.TopFieldCollector$MultiComparatorNonScoringCollector.collect(TopFieldCollector.java:404) at org.apache.lucene.search.IndexSearcher.searchWithFilter(IndexSearcher.java:575)

Cause

This issue is caused by a know bug: JRASERVER-33365 - Issue Search has performance problems when sorting by custom field Labels

Workaround

  • Remove the sorting by custom field from the search filters;

  • Watch the bug report for further updates.

Updated on April 8, 2025

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