Problem

Some pages in Confluence can be slow to load due to dynamic content or macros being used in it. This page identifies some of those scenarios. You shouldn't be following this guide if Confluence is slow overall and all pages experience slowness.

Diagnosis

Content in body of the page can contribute to how slow or fast it loads. Especially some macros which are pulling data can make the rendering of the page slow. So, we will need to identify any such content. Most common ones are,

• Include macro
• Content by user macro
• Any user User macro designed to go through a lot of data

Include Macro

Include Macro can be useful for reusing content. This is common when a single source of truth is required and distributed across several pages. If these macros are used in large numbers (10+) then the page can be slow to load. The page which are loaded in Include Macro can have dynamic content also which can also lead to more lag during load.

If these Macros are excessively used in the page, try removing some. Excerpt Include Macro is also a good workaround, as it loads only the part of the page as opposed to loading it completely. 

Content by User and Contributors Macro

Content by User and Contributors macro goes through heavy amount of data for a page load. The slowness can vary a lot depending on the content of users and number of contributors of the page. There have been significant improvements in how these work in the past. Some improvements are still under progress.

• CONFSERVER-52066 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• CONFSERVER-59514 - Getting issue details... STATUS

So, we shouldn't be surprised if the page load is slow with these macros. 

User Macros

User Macros which are collecting data can also cause slow page loads. It of course depends upon the execution of the macro and how much data it is accumulating. If thread dumps are taken we can expect to see the following stack trace while viewing the page,

...
	at com.atlassian.confluence.macro.GenericVelocityMacro.execute(GenericVelocityMacro.java:100)
	at com.atlassian.confluence.content.render.xhtml.view.macro.ViewMacroMarshaller.executeMacro(ViewMacroMarshaller.java:225)
...
	at com.atlassian.confluence.pages.actions.ViewPageAction.execute(ViewPageAction.java:184)
...

This shows that a User macro is being executed. If multiple thread dumps are taken and the above stack trace appears consistently, then a user macro on the page is slowing it down.

Still having issues?

The above macros are just a sample list to help understand how page loads can slow down if macros are fetching a lot of data. There are other macros as well which can pull a lot of data and depending on the size of the instance, performance can vary. If the problem hasn't been narrowed down after going through this page, enable Page Profiling and reach out to Atlassian Support with a Support zip of Confluence.