Can spaces impact the system performance?
Asked by Martin James:

Hi there,

Our Confluence system is forever expanding and we need to keep an eye on the future growth to ensure we keep it as efficient as possible for the users. We have 48 global spaces and 78 personal spaces.

Does both the global and personal space have an impact on the system performance?

Many thanks

M.


Answers:
author: Midori
body: We know about Confluence instances with ++thousands++ of spaces!

It obviously depends on the hardware, but Confluence software should be easily handle your scale.

On the other hand, the space count by itselft is not very critical. **The number of pages, page versions, comments, attachments (their filesizes), attachment versions have more significant effect on the end-user performance experience.**

comments: author: Martin James
body: Thanks for the info. Very useful. :smile:


author: Davin Studer
body: I've heard of companies with hundreds of spaces. Confluence is designed to support lots of spaces. You should be fine. Now, you do want to make sure that you have disk space for all the data. Certainly if you add more spaces you're going to need more disk space. Also, it stands to reason that as you add more spaces you are probably adding more users as well, so your load on the server will be more due to increased traffic. But simply adding more spaces, if nothing else changed, shouldn't affect the performance of your site.

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: The main thing is the performance of the indexing - the larger your instance, the larger the index and so, in some places, the longer it's going to take to do things.

But that's a function of volume of data rather than number of spaces.


author: Sandy Johnson
body: We do not have a large implementation of Confluence, however, we have found that if we do not reboot the server on a regular basis that the performance does degrade pretty quickly. We reboot once a week.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: You probably want to investigate that properly instead of plastering over the cracks.


author: Martin James
body: Thanks :smile:


author: StephanieC
body: Does ratio of users to spaces make a difference? The examples Ive seen instances have anywhere from 5 users for every 1 space to 10 users for every 1 space. We have 1.5 spaces per user... or 5 users for every 7.5 spaces.


author: Davin Studer
body: I have thousands of users per space. User per space ratio should really not be an issue.


author: Richard Cross
body: Ok, but what if (for the sake of argument) you had thousands of spaces per user?

Would that have any impact on indexing/search? Is there some upper limit on the number of Spaces Confluence will support?

As I mentioned in my own reply, there are some administrative costs of having a large number of Spaces.


author: Davin Studer
body: I'm sure there is some limit, but that limit is probably more a function of the amount of content than spaces. We have tens of thousands of pages in our site and about 50-100 spaces.

I would imagine, although I have not really tested this, that if you had 10,000 one page spaces it would perform about the same as if you had a ten 1000 pages spaces. I would also think that thousands of spaces per user would probably not be very useful. How would anyone find anything?

Also, keep in mind that Confluence really is designed to handle thousands of spaces as it is possible for people to have personal spaces. If you have a 10,000 user license you could very easily have 10,000+ spaces.


author: Richard Cross
body: My own take on this is the cost of administration/support for those managing the Confluence instance.

Our system has nearly 5000 Spaces. That's 5000 different places a user might have to have permission to in order to view content. We have about 20,000 users and, whenever they cannot access a page, they come to our support team first. The scale of this is overwhelming.

With fewer Spaces, we'd have far fewer support calls like this.

We do then tell them to contact the Space owner, for which they need to look that up in the Space Directory.

Except, the search function in the Space Directory doesn't work very well with 5,000 spaces. Your search term is not only matched against Space titles... therefore even if you type in the exact name of a Space, you'll get dozens of irrelevant results that match none of the search terms.

With fewer Spaces, the Space Directory would surely perform better?

And, with 5,000 Spaces, you can completely forget about ever implementing this: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-do-i-view-a-list-of-all-space-administrators-for-all-spaces-346325879.html>