Performance in Confluence 3.5
Asked by Sozhavendhan M:

Currently we are using confluence 3.4 and its performance is so low and we are planning for upgrading it to 3.5.

Can you please state me the features which enhances the Performance of Confluence application by upgrading it from 3.4 to 3.5.

Thanks in Advance..


Answers:
author: MatthewC
body: A couple of questions....

* What investigations have you done so far?
* Where is the slowness coming from?
* What is slow? What is the user experience?
* Why Confluence 3.5? It hits end of life on 6 Sep 2013. Is there a reason you are not upgrading to Confluence 4.x ? <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Support/Atlassian+Support+End+of+Life+Policy>
* have you looked at the release notes? they usually tell you the enhancements: <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+3.5+Release+Notes>

comments: author: MatthewC
body: BTW Confluence 3.4 wasn't a slow product, well maybe compared to what it is now but I suspect your problem is coming from somewhere other than just the core confluence product


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I suspect the target is 3.5 because a lot of users want wiki markup and 3.5 is the last version of Confluence that has it. There's a lot of people seriously considering dropping it because of that (I'm aware of four large sites on the way to other systems before September)


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I have to agree with you on the performance side though - I've still got a couple of people on 3.4 and it's working fine for them. The users I know of on 3.5 don't really see much improvement in performance, so if there's an issue dragging down your 3.4, it's unlikely to be fixed by going to 3.5.


author: JamieA
body: The four large sites should just upgrade. I was as sceptical as anyone else, but, even though it's far from perfect, I'd never go back to typing in wiki markup until that horrible little text box. The trouble is you can't know that it's OK until you do it, because it takes a couple of weeks to get used to it, and when you are just kicking the tyres you never get past that phase. 4.0 was not good, but now it's fine.


author: MatthewC
body: I think I may actually agree with Jamie on this, for a big site to walk away just because they don't like the editor is a little short sighted. Had a similar experience years ago going from Jira 3.13.x to 4.something. users howled and screamed and threated to go back to spreadsheets because it was "useless". Took a month or two but everyone came round again and the spreadsheets stopped.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: I know. I like Confluence 4. The people looking after them have tried (I'm not directly responsible for three of them, still working on persuading the fourth where I do have a voice), but it's going nowhere. It's not actually the lack of wiki markup that's the problem for them, it's the fact "I can't edit what I typed". The source editor is a step in the right direction, but until they can edit what they entered in the format they entered it in, it's not going to happen.

Jira is a different kettle of fish - lots of noise every time the interface changes, but easy to fix by simple "look, it's all there, just a different shape"


author: Sozhavendhan M
body: @ Matthew: I went though the Release Note of 3.5, everything I found was New features in 3.5 nothing related to a higher performance.  
We also tried some performance tuning as stated in :  
<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Performance+Tuning>

But we weren't successful in performing all the performance tuning.

We couldn't identify the exact reason behind the laggish behavior of Confluence 3.4.6 .  
It may due to excessive Logging.

Navigation within the confluence application is slow. Page loads very slowly.  

So for better performance we wish to upgrade Confluence to a Higher version.  

Also I wish to know whether to edit options are better than 3.4 or both are more or less the same.  
To my knowledge 3.4 also support Wiki markup language. But for color option we had to code it, there are no customized menu for Color.

We are supposed to Upgrade to 3.5 before upgrading it to 4.X. If 3.5 gives a good performance we may wish to stop with it.

Thanks :Matthew, Nic \& Jamie for your valuable suggestion.


author: Sozhavendhan M
body: Will upgrading to Version 4.3 (Latest version) solve the issue regarding the performance.?


author: Alex Suslin
body: atlassian documentation is based on confluence, is it slow to you?


author: MatthewC
body: I wouldn't be comfortable saying that just upgrading to 4.3 is going to solve your problem. 3.4 wasn't a bad performing system so it's not the software version that is the problem. I'd say you have some other problem causing your poor performance and if you just upgrade, you may just take the problem with you. It may also go away, it could come from a plugin and if that is also upgraded, it may remove a problem, you just don't know.