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.
Enterprise-scale Confluence sites
These recommendations are designed for small or medium sized Confluence sites. For guidance on large or extra large sites, read our enterprise-scale infrastructure recommendations.
We've also created load profiles to help you determine the size of your site.
Minimum hardware requirements
The values below refer to the minimum available hardware required to run Confluence only; for example, the minimum heap size to allocate to Confluence is 1 GB and 1 GB for Synchrony (which is required for collaborative editing). You'll need additional physical hardware, of at least the minimum amount required by your Operating System and any other applications that run on the server.
On small instances, server load is primarily driven by peak visitors, so minimum system requirements are difficult to judge. We provide these figures as a guide to the absolute minimum required to run Confluence, and your configuration will likely require better hardware.
Here is our minimum hardware recommendation:
- CPU: Quad core 2GHz+ CPU
- RAM: 6GB
- Minimum database space: 10GB
Note: Please be aware that while some of our customers run Confluence on SPARC-based hardware, we only officially support Confluence running on x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware. Confluence typically will not perform well in a tightly constrained, shared environment - examples include an AWS micro.t1 instance. Please be careful to ensure that your choice of hosting platform is capable of supplying sustained processing and memory capacity for the server, particularly the processing-intense startup process.
Example hardware specifications
These are example hardware specifications for non-clustered Confluence instances. It is not recorded whether the amount of RAM refers to either the total server memory or memory allocated to the JVM, while blank settings indicate that the information was not provided.
Accounts | Spaces | Pages | CPUs | CPU (GHz) | RAM (MB) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
150 | 30 | 1,000 | 1 | 2.6 | 1,024 | |
350 | 100 | 15,000 | 2 | 2.8 | 1,536 | |
5,000 | 500 | 4 | 3 | 2,048 | ||
10,000 | 350 | 16,000 | 2 | 3.8 | 2,048 | |
10,000 | 60 | 3,500 | 2 | 3.6 | 4,096 | |
21,000 | 950 | 2 | 3.6 | 4,096 | ||
85,000 | 100 | 12,500 | 4 | 2.6 | 4,096 | 3 machines total: application server, database server, Apache HTTPD + LDAP tunnel server. |
Server load and 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 512MB of memory
- Always use an external database, and check out the performance tuning guides.
Maximum reported usages
These values are largest customer instances reported to Atlassian or used for performance testing. Clustering, database tuning and other performance tuning is recommended for instances exceeding these values.
Most Spaces | 1700 |
Most Internal Users | 15K |
Most LDAP Users | 100K |
Most Pages | 80K |
Hard disk requirements
All page content is stored in the database, while attachments are stored in the file system. The more attachments you have, the more disk space you will require.
Private and public 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:
Use Case | Spaces | User | Editors | Editor To | Pages | Page Revisions | Attachments | Comments | Total Data | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Online Documentation | 140 | 11,500 | 1,000 | 9% | 8,800 | 65,000 | 7,300 | 11,500 | 10.4 | |
Private Intranet | 130 | 180 | 140 | 78% | 8,000 | 84,000 | 3,800 | 500 | 4.5 | |
Company-Wide Collaboration | 100 | 85,000 | 1,000+ | 1%+ | 12,500 | 120,000 | 15,000 |
Professional assistance
For large instances, it may be worthwhile contacting an Atlassian Solution Partner for expertise on hardware sizing, testing and performance tuning.
Example site
Here's a breakdown of the disk usage and memory requirements of a large documentation site as at April 2013:
Database size | 2827 MB |
|---|---|
Home directory size | 116 GB |
| Average memory in use | 1.9 GB |
Size of selected database tables
Data | Relevant Table | Rows | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
Attachment metadata | attachments | 193903 | 60 MB |
Content and user properties | os_propertyentry (?) | 639737 | 255 MB |
Content bodies (incl. all versions of blogs, pages and comments) | bodycontent | 517520 | 1354 MB |
Content metadata (incl. title, author) | content | 623155 | 459 MB |
Labels | label (5982, 1264 kB), content_label (134151, 46 MB) | 140133 | 47.2 MB |
Users | users | 38766 | 6200 kB |
Note: not all database tables or indexes are shown, and average row size may vary between instances.
Size of selected home directory components
Data | Files | Size |
|---|---|---|
Attachments (incl. all versions) | 207659 | 105 GB |
Did-you-mean search index | 10 | 14 MB |
Office Connector cache | 3506 | 456 MB |
Plugin files | 1851 | 669 MB |
Search index | 448 | 3.9 GB |
Temporary files | 14232 | 5 GB |
Thumbnails | 86516 | 1.7 GB |
Usage index (now disabled) | 239 | 2.6 GB |
Note: not all files are shown, and average file size may vary between instances.