Two tricks to improve the performance and security of your Jira Server 7.4

There are two tricks to improve the performance and the security of a large Jira Server 7.4

For the first “trick“, we can develop a little Jira plugin, or we can set a “Script Fragment” with the plugin Adaptavist Groovy Scriptrunner.

The purpose of the improvement is to avoid problematic JQL queries. In Jira, by default, when some user click on the option “Search for Issues“, the system returns “all the tickets visibles for the user” ,and this, in open-minded organizations, is a very large resultset (about 500K issues or more probably…). This is a very slow query and can affect the performance of the entire system. While Atlassian doesn’t fix this problem, we can remove the option in a simple way with the plugin Adaptavist Scriptrunner.

Very easy to do…

1.- Go to the Add-ons section / Scriptrunner and click on “Script Fragments”

2.- Add a new item to Hide a system or plugin UI element and add something like this (see the screenshot). We want to hide the jira.top.navigation.bar:issues_new_search_link

After that, the system will hide the “Search for Issues” option. Instead of this, the users can use “Current Search” that searches with the last query used. If the option isn’t visible, the user can access to the Search page, using the usual “search inputbox” (on the top right  of the bar)

For the second trick, to improve the performance and the security of our large Jira we need to install a FREE plugin called “Prevent Anonymous Access“.

With this plugin we can avoid the “public” leak of the names of the Agile boards for the anonymous access… this is a “security” problem of Jira. To prevent this, this plugin once installed, automatically protects the anonymous access to the site.

As a wonderful feature, we can add a White list and a Black list of “URL“s, and this is awesome, because it’s a good way to “stop” the horrible and slow Jira Endpoint…. like the URL “/rest/analytics/1.0/publish/bulk”

Be carefully, because this solution “blocks” slow URL’s of the site, and sometimes, some URL’s must be set in the White List to get always unblocked.

Hope this information will be useful for you!

Our JIRA now is more faster with these solutions!