We are looking into creating an issue tracker/wiki setup for a small team (no more than 10 developers). In the past few days we have looked over some options, and so far, my favorite setup is JIRA and Confluence. Before doing anything for real, I created a mock server that mimics the server that will actually be used (Windows 2008 R2/MySQL/Lateset JIRA/Confluence 4.0 – still in beta but supposed to go final soon).
The setup went quite smoothly, but I've had some questions that might affect us and was wondering if anyone had similar experiences:
- Both JIRA and Confluence are major memory hogs (using 400MB each for a fresh, empty installation) – the production server will have around 8GB of memory, but I am worried this will become an issue in the future. Is this usual or have I configured something incorrectly?
- Both applications are occasionally sluggish, despite not being really used. Without an obvious pattern, usage becomes very slow, and I can see heavy CPU usage on the tomcat process. As above, can something be done about this?
- In the mock, I used a VMWare workstation as the server, something which I understand can cause performance issues, the production server is not virtualized, will this improve performance considerably?
- Did someone had any experience using JIRA or Confluence in a right-to-left environment (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, etc)? In confluence, I got some good results quickly by using custom CSS in the Space Admin, but I can't find a similar feature in JIRA.
Thank you for your time.
Best Answer
I use both and they are running on CentOS 5.x under VMware. The confluence uses 1.1GB of virtual memory and 645MB of residential and JIRA is at 1.2G/687MB correspondingly. Of course it is a lot of memory, but it is not that big deal for us. The application may respond slowly and be a bit sluggish if not used for while, but after some activity it is pretty responsive. I think this is common behavior for java web applications, but the performance can be improved with some tuning if it bothers you much.
I think in term of functionality JIRA with Confluence are a good choice. They well documented and support is great. The starter license is virtually free, however at some point you may hit the wall of 10 users and upgrade to the next level will cost you some real moneys. So, if you expect growth of your user base then keep this in mind.
Both Confluence and JIRA have a load of features but it does not mean you have to use all of them. I started running them in standard configuration and I have a little urge to do any customization (upgrades may be painful otherwise).
We are using both systems for about 5-7 years now. Our users get used to interface and I haven't heard any complains or requests for features that I could not accommodate for quite some time now, so my personal opinion - thumbs up.
P.S. No experience with right-to-left languages though.