Memory Usage and Requirements
Managing Confluence's performance and memory usage really depends on what resources are available. Confluence will run faster if you give it lots of memory for its caches, but it should still be able to run quite well in low-memory environments, with the right tuning. Below are some tips on getting the most out of your Confluence site.
Increasing the amount of memory available to Confluence
See Increasing JIRA Memory for details on how to increase the memory available to web application servers typically used to run Confluence.
Embedded database
The embedded HSQL database that comes with Confluence essentially holds all your data in memory while the Confluence server is running. If you are running out of memory, you should consider migrating Confluence to an external database.
Caching
By default, Confluence keeps large in-memory caches of data to improve its responsiveness and the user experience. The trade off is an increase in memory requirements to support the cache. Administrators of larger Confluence sites may need to configure the size of their caches to improve performance.
To customize Confluence's cache to meet your needs, see cache tuning.
To increase the amount of memory available to Confluence, see Fix java.lang.OutOfMemoryError in Confluence.
Mail error queue
Confluence keeps a copy of all emails that it failed to send within an internal error queue. In the event of intermittent failures such as network connectivity issues, the emails in this queue can be manually resent when the problem is fixed. Under certain circumstances, the mail queue can fill up with large objects. The queue is regularly flushed, but if you get a lot of mail errors, you might get a spike in memory usage.
Attachments
The indexing of large attachments requires that the attachment be loaded into memory. In the case of large attachments, this can cause a temporary strain on the systems resources, and may result in indexing failing because the attachment could not be fully loaded into memory.
System backup and restore
The Confluence backup and restore process scales linearly with the size of data. This can have a significant impact on large Confluence instances where the amount of data exceeds the amount of available memory. If you are experiencing an OutOfMemoryError during either a backup or restore processes, then we strongly recommend that you choose and Production Backup Strategy.
If you encounter an OutOfMemoryError while restoring a backup and wish to overcome this issue by increasing memory, how much more will you need to make this process work? A good rule of thumb is to have a look at the size of the entities.xml file in your backup. This file contains all of the data Confluence will be loading, so at least that much is required. Add another 64-128Mb to ensure that Confluence has enough memory to load and function and that should be enough. To increase the amount of memory available to Confluence, see Fix java.lang.OutOfMemoryError in Confluence.
Known issues that we do not have control over
There are also some memory issues we don't have any control over. For example,
- There's a memory leak in the Oracle 10g JDBC drivers. Not much we can do about that.
- One customer found a rather nasty memory leak that appeared to originate inside Tomcat 5, but only using the IBM JDK on PowerPC.
If you are having problems that appear to result from a memory leak, log an issue on http://support.atlassian.com. Our memory profiler of choice is YourKit. It would be helpful to us if you can provide us with a memory dump from that tool showing the leak.
Confluence is taking long periods of time to respond to some actions
A common cause of random pauses in Confluence is the JVM running garbage collection. To determine if this is what is happening, enable verbose garbage collection and look at how long Java is taking to free up memory. If the random pauses match when Java is running its garbage collection, garbage collection is the cause of the pause.
Verbose garbage collection will generate log statements that indicate when Java is collecting garbage, how long it takes, and how much memory has been freed.
To enable gc (garbage collection) logging, start Confluence with the option -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -verbose:gc -Xloggc:gc.log. Replace gc.log with an absolute path to a gc.log file.
For example, with a Windows service, run:
tomcat5 //US//Confluence ++JvmOptions="-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -verbose:gc -Xloggc:c:\confluence\logs\gc.log"
or in bin/setenv.sh, set:
export CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -verbose:gc -Xloggc:${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/gc.log"
If you modify bin/setenv.sh, you will need to restart Confluence for the changes to take effect.
What can you do to minimize the time taken to handle the garbage collection? See http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/gc1.4.2/ for details on tuning the JVM to minimize the impact that garbage collection has on the running application.