Problem

While it is not recommended to perform a bulk operation for more than 1000 issues - this is to avoid performance issues on a JIRA instance, sometimes we would like to bulk edit or bulk edit issues on a test/development instance.

1. We can increase the bulk edit issue limit as per the KB article in How do you increase the bulk change maximum?.
2. Bulk edit operation will hit XSRF Security Token Missing if we edit more than 9997 issues, even after setting the jira.bulk.edit.limit.issue.count to 10000. 

Diagnose

In <install-folder>/logs/catalina.<date>.log, you can see maxParameterCount has exceeded the limit in a single request:

28-Jun-2022 09:05:13.293 INFO [https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-20] org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.processParameters More than the maximum number of request parameters (GET plus POST) for a single request ([10,000]) were detected. Any parameters beyond this limit have been ignored. To change this limit, set the maxParameterCount attribute on the Connector.

Cause

In Tomcat, the default value for maxParameterCount is 10000. It means Tomcat doesn't take more than 10000 parameters and when we bulk edit more than 9997 issues, the request is losing the token due to the limitation. More information can be found here; Apache Tomcat 8 Configuration Reference.

Resolution

Option 1: Export issues to smaller amounts such as 5k issues per export. 

Option 2: Increase the maxParameterCount limit via server.xml

1. Stop JIRA.

2. Edit server.xml to make sure the connector has the maxParameterCount configuration, for example: 

   For JIRA Software version 7.12.3 and above:

   <Connector port="8080"
                      maxThreads="150"
                      minSpareThreads="25"
                      connectionTimeout="20000"
                      enableLookups="false"
                      maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
                      protocol="HTTP/1.1"
                      useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
                      acceptCount="100"
                      disableUploadTimeout="true"
                      relaxedPathChars="[]|" 
                      relaxedQueryChars="[]|{}^&#x5c;&#x60;&quot;&lt;&gt;"
                      maxParameterCount="10100" />

   For JIRA version lower than 7.12.3:

   <Connector port="8080"
                      maxThreads="150"
                      minSpareThreads="25"
                      connectionTimeout="20000"
                      enableLookups="false"
                      maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
                      protocol="HTTP/1.1"
                      useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
                      acceptCount="100"
                      disableUploadTimeout="true"
                      maxParameterCount="10100" />

    The trick is to always have maxParameterCount more by 100 of the jira.bulk.edit.limit.issue.count value to prevent any problem.

3. Start JIRA.