Server Hardware Requirements Guide

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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.

(info) 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:

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
Accounts

Editors

Editor To
Viewer Ratio

Pages

Page Revisions

Attachments

Comments

Total Data
Size (GB)

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 use1.9 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.

Last modified on Aug 1, 2019

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