We are running Jira on a 4 way 32 bit RHEL box with 4 GB RAM with no problems so far. However we anticipate an increase in the number of users and would like to know the maximum no. of simultaneous requests that a Tomcat-Jira server can handle. (The Jira application is deployed on a standalone tomcat server that runs nothing else, so even Tomcat only statistics would help).
Currently we average around 6000 hits a day. Does anyone have any statistics from their setups for a comparison?
The main thing you should be looking at is the HTTP Connector definition in JIRA's conf/server.xml file. Our JIRA (which I think uses the defaults) shows the config as:
<Connector port="8080"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75" useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100" connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" />
The thread values are the ones to consider, they define how many concurrent users the server can sustain. A maxThread value of 150 means a hard limit of 150 users at the same time.
If you're currently seeing 6000 hits a day, you're going to have to increase that by several orders of magnitude before hitting the limits of the default settings.
As a consultant and Atlassian partner, I see many different JIRA installations. Most have 10K issues, some have 200K issues or more. It's rarely the hits/day that are the limit. Usually you'll find your database config is the culprit or sometimes the number of users managed by JIRA - over 8K users with JIRA 3.13.x can get slow.
~Matt
What you should do is setup a stress test. Every application is different and so you need to find where the issues are with your setup. You can use JMeter, a custom application, Selenium, or a number of other options to put your server under load. Grow the number of users slowly adding a few every 5 minutes. You will start seeing problems and can address them as they are hit. Repeat this until you have reached the number of concurrent users, hits per minute, or whatever other metric is important to you.