Server Hardware Requirements Guide

Server administrators can use this guide in combination with the free Confluence trial period to evaluate their server hardware requirements. Because server load is difficult to predict, live testing is the best way to determine what hardware a Confluence instance will require in production.

Peak visitors are the maximum number of browsers simultaneously making requests to access or update pages in Confluence. Visitors are counted from their first page request until the connection is closed and if public access is enabled, this includes internet visitors as well as logged in users. Storage requirements will vary depending on how many pages and attachments you wish to store inside Confluence.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

On small instances, server load is primarily driven by peak visitors.

5 Concurrent Users

• 2GHz+ CPU
• 512MB RAM
• 5GB database space

25 Concurrent Users

• Quad 2GHz+ CPU
• 2GB+ RAM
• 10GB database space

Please be aware that while some of our customers run Confluence on SPARC-based hardware, Atlassian only officially supports Confluence running on x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware.

Example Hardware Specifications

These are example hardware specifications for non-clustered Confluence instances. It is not recorded whether the RAM refers to either total server memory or memory allocated to the JVM, while blank settings indicate that the information was not provided.

Server Load & Scalability

When planning server hardware requirements for your Confluence deployment, you will need to estimate the server scalability based on peak visitors, the editor to viewer ratio and total content.

• The editor to viewer ratio is how many visitors are performing updates versus those only viewing content
• Total content is best estimated by a count of total spaces

Confluence scales best with a steady flow of visitors rather than defined peak visitor times, few editors and few spaces. Users should also take into account:

• Total pages is not a major consideration for performance. For example, instances hosting 80K of pages can consume under 512 meg of memory
• Always use an external database, and check out the performance tuning guides.

As mentioned on the documentation for Operating Large or Mission-Critical Confluence Installations, some important steps are loadtesting your usecase and monitoring the system continuously to find out where your system could do better and what might need to improve in order to scale further.

Maximum Reported Usages

These values are largest customer instances reported to Atlassian or used for performance testing. Clustering for load balancing, database tuning and other performance tuning is recommended for instances exceeding these values.

Hard Disk Requirements

All wiki content is stored in the database, while attachments use either the database or filesystem. For example, the wiki instance you are reading now uses approximately 1 GB of database space and 9.4 GB of disk space.

Here is a breakdown of the disk usage requirements for this wiki, as at December 2008:

Size of selected database tables

Note: not all database tables or indexes are shown, and average row size may vary between instances.

Size of selected home directory components

Note: not all files are shown, and average file size may vary between instances.

Private & Online Comparison

Private instances manage their users either internally or through a user repository such as LDAP, while online instances have public signup enabled and must handle the additional load of anonymous internet visitors. Please keep in mind that these are examples only, not recommendations:

Professional Assistance

For large instances, it may be worthwhile contacting an Atlassian partner for expertise on hardware sizing, testing and performance tuning. Simply contact a local partner directly or email our partner manager for a recommendation.

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