System Requirements

Please review the system requirements below before installing Confluence.

Client Requirements

You can use the following web browsers to access Confluence:

The currently supported browsers are:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.x and 3.0.x
Safari 2.0 (no rich-text editing), 3.0 and 3.1

We recommend using the latest production-level versions of these browsers: Firefox 3, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7. Newer browser versions tend to perform better and have fewer bugs. In particular we strongly suggest using IE7 instead of IE6.

Support for Internet Explorer 6

Confluence will support IE6 until the 13th of July, 2010, in line with Microsoft's Support Lifecycle policy. Confluence 3.0 and future versions through 2009 will continue to support IE6.

Other Client Requirement Information

More information about browser support and why rich-text editing is only available for some browsers can be found on the browser support page.

Server Requirements

Confluence works with a broad range of operating systems, database systems and application servers. Provided you have the technical knowledge, it is very likely that you will be able to run Confluence with an 8-year-old database, or even on some 8-year-old hardware. Realistically, it is not technically feasible for us to provide our legendary support service on all environments available. There can only be a finite number of environments and release versions of those that we support.

Our rule of thumb when releasing a new version of Confluence is that we will officially support environments that have been released within the last one to two years (latest version if none released). This does not necessarily mean you need to upgrade your database or application server every time you upgrade Confluence — but if you do run into problems with an unsupported database version or application server version, we may have to ask you to upgrade to something newer.

Example: You run Confluence 2.7.3 on PostgreSQL 8.0, and everything works fine. You decide to upgrade to Confluence 2.8, which is officially supported only on PostgreSQL 8.1.Chances are that you can run Confluence 2.8 with PostgreSQL 8.0 with no problems whatsoever. You can simply try for yourself if you feel that upgrading PostgreSQL at the same time is too much of a hassle. If you run into problems later, we will try to help you even though you are on a officially unsupported platform, and we probably will be able to help you. But if we can't, then we may ask you to upgrade to PostgreSQL 8.1 or 8.2 before we dive deeper into the problem. If you know beforehand that a database upgrade is not viable, then it is best that you consider delaying the upgrade of Confluence.

For further information please also have a look at our Supported Platforms FAQ.

Atlassian's Hosted solutions are an alternative
If you feel that the above sounds complicated — how about using our hosted solutions? We can run and maintain your wiki on our servers and deal with all the testing, monitoring and upgrading processes for you! Have a look at our Confluence Hosted website and our integrated JIRA Studio website for more details.

Operating System

Virtual Environments such as VMware are unsupported and not recommended due to performance problems.These performance issues are especially significant for clustered Confluence.

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.

Supported operating systems:

Windows (including 64-bit)
Linux
Mac OS X
Solaris
Unix

Confluence should work on any system that has Java 5 support. If you can get Confluence running on an unsupported operating system we will still try to help you if you encounter problems, but we may ask you to move to a supported operating system before we can provide more detailed support.

Database

The Confluence installation includes a pre-configured HSQLDB database for evaluation purposes only. For safe production use, you need to configure Confluence to use an external database listed below.

Supported Databases

Confluence supports the following database systems, provided they are running on a Windows, Unix (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Linux), Mac OS X on X86 or X86-64 processors.

	Supported in Confluence 3.0 (JUN/2009)	Works with Confluence 3.0
PostgreSQL	8.1, 8.2	8.0, 8.3
Oracle	10.1, 10.2	11
MySQL	5.0.28 and above	5.0 - 5.0.27
DB2	8.2
SQL Server	2005

Column labelled 'Works with' as opposed to 'Supported in': We assume that Confluence works fine with these database versions. But please be aware that we don't test these versions regularly and that we may ask you to upgrade to a supported platform before we can provide more detailed support.

If your database does not appear on this list, please read the questions and answers about supported platforms.

If you have no preference, we recommend using PostgreSQL — it is scalable, free, and easy to set up. For database setup information, see Database Configuration.

Refer to the list of known issues for these databases.

Unsupported Databases

For Confluence 2.10 and later, MySQL 4.1.x is not supported — please upgrade to MySQL 5.

The decision to deprecate this database was announced previously.

There is a workaround to enable MySQL 4.1.x.

Application Server

Supported and Compatible J2EE Application Servers

Confluence supports the following application servers, provided they are running on a Windows, Unix (NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solarix, Linux), Mac OS X on X86 or X86-64 processors.

	Supported in Confluence 3.0 (JUN/2009)	Works with Confluence 3.0
Apache Tomcat	5.5.20+, 6.0	5.5
BEA Weblogic	9.2	9.1, 10
IBM Websphere Application Server	6.1
Caucho Resin	3.0, 3.1.6, 3.1.7
JBoss	4.2

Column labelled 'Works with' as opposed to 'Supported in': We assume that Confluence works fine with these application server versions. But please be aware that we don't test these versions regularly and that we may ask you to upgrade to a supported version before we can provide more detailed support.

Please see configuration guides for supported application servers.

If you have no preference, we recommend using Confluence Standalone which includes Apache Tomcat.

Unsupported J2EE Application Servers

For Confluence 2.10 and later, the following application servers are no longer supported:

Tomcat 5.0 — please upgrade to Tomcat 5.5 or 6
Resin 2 — please upgrade to Resin 3.0 or 3.1
JBoss 4.0.x — please upgrade to JBoss 4.2.x or higher.
The decision to deprecate these platforms was announced previously.

Potentially Compatible Application Servers

The following application servers may work with Confluence. Whilst they are not known to possess any problems or incompatibilities with Confluence, they have not been sufficiently tested to be considered a compatible Application Server. Consequently, they are not supported.

J2EE Application Servers:

Macromedia JRun

Non J2EE Application Servers:

Microsoft IIS Server

Refer to the Supported Platforms FAQ.

Known Incompatible J2EE Application Servers

The following application servers may (in part) work with Confluence. However, they are known to possess problems or incompatibilities with Confluence and consequently are not supported.

Oracle OC4J / Oracle Application Server — see reported issue
Sun Application Server — see reported issue
GlassFish — see reported issue
SAP-J2EE — see reported issue

Antivirus Software Configuration

Antivirus software greatly decreases the performance of Confluence. Antivirus software that intercepts access to the hard disk is particularly detrimental, and may even cause errors in Confluence.

You should configure your antivirus software to ignore the following directories:

Confluence home directory
Confluence's index directory
All database-related directories

The above recommendation is particularly important if you are running Confluence on Windows. No matter how fast your CPUs are and how many cores they have, antivirus software will always seriously slow down your Confluence performance — sometimes to a point where Confluence is impossible to use.

Server Load

Server load depends primarily on the number of users online at once and their usage of Confluence.

Under 25 concurrent users:

2GHz+ CPU or equivalent
512MB RAM

Over 25 concurrent users:

Dual 2GHz+ CPU Xeon or equivalent
512MB+ RAM

Over 100 concurrent users:

Quad 2GHz+ CPU Xeon or equivalent
4GB of RAM

See Server Hardware Requirements Guide for details.

Refer also to the tips on reducing out of memory errors, in particular the section on Permanent Generation Size.

Disk Space

Confluence Install Directory - 250MB

Install files
Nightly site backups
Temporary files

Confluence Home Directory or External Database - 250MB minimum

Text content
File attachments

Java

Confluence requires a supported version of the JDK (Java Development Kit) to be installed. Confluence supports the following Java versions:

Java 5 (JDK 1.5)
Java 6 (JDK 1.6)

JDK 1.4 is not supported in Confluence version 2.9 or later. Please see Java 1.4 Support Timeline for more information.

Refer to the instructions on installing Java for Confluence.