Reduce the number of projects and issues
This recommendation is shown when your Jira issue index has grown very large and is likely contributing to slower JQL query performance. Archiving inactive projects and issues can help reduce the index footprint.
Signals used
Details of how we detect this issue.
Conditions
The following conditions need to occur together:
At least one key experience, such as viewing or editing an issue, shows degraded page load times (RFU).
JQL query performance is degraded; either JQL execution times are elevated compared to their historical baseline, or the number of JQL slow query events is increasing.
JQL execution time or slow query count has been trending upward over the last month, and the issue count has also been growing.
The issue count or project count is at or close to the recommended guardrails for your instance size.
How we detect it
We use a combination of performance metrics and system events:
Signal | Details |
|---|---|
RFU degradation | We look for Ready for User (RFU) degradation - cases where key Jira experiences take significantly longer than their historical baseline. This helps us confirm that users are actually experiencing slower page loads, not just one-off spike. |
JQL execution time degradation | We look for cases where JQL query execution times are significantly elevated compared to their historical baseline. |
JQL slow query events | We monitor whether the number of JQL slow query events has increased. A rise in slow queries indicates that more queries are exceeding acceptable execution time thresholds. |
Issue count trend | We track whether the total issue count in the Jira instance has been growing over time. A steadily increasing issue count contributes to a larger index and can worsen query performance. |
Issue and project count vs. guardrails | We compare the current issue count and project count against recommended guardrails (18,000,000 issues; 7,000 projects). A guardrail is considered "close" to breaching at 90% of the threshold. |
Filters
When this issue occurs multiple times, we group occurrences under different time filters, for example a 24‑hour or 7‑day period. In this case:
For degraded experiences, we show the highest degradation from all occurrences in the selected time filter.
For data and limits, we show the highest number of projects and issues from all occurrences.
Frequency chart
The frequency chart shows how often this issue has occurred over time. This can help you identify patterns such as:
the time of day or week when the number of projects or issues affects your performance the most
whether previous archiving efforts reduced how often this recommendation appears
Recommended actions
You can take the following actions to reduce the number of projects and issues.
Archive inactive projects
Start by archiving projects. You can use Instance optimizer to find inactive projects that are good candidates for archiving.
How to archive inactive projects with Instance optimizer
Archive inactive issues
If you’re still above the recommended values or unable to archive entire projects, try archiving individual issues that are no longer needed or haven’t been updated for a long time.
Was this helpful?