As the Jira administrator, you want your instance to run quickly and efficiently. Among other things, re-indexing will help you. Check what it is and how often to do it!

Today you will learn:

1. WHAT IS REINDEXATION

2. WHY DO IT

3. HOW OFTEN

4. WHAT KIND TO CHOOSE

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WHAT IS REINDEXATION

In simple terms, it is creating a cache copy of a database that is configured to find jobs as quickly as possible. An index is a set of locally stored files that Jira has quick access to, and searching for content is much more efficient than querying the database directly.

WHY DO IT

When you make modifications to one of the areas: Field configuration schemes, Custom fields, Apps and Time tracking, you need to refresh your projects and tasks so that they can “see” your changes. If you do not do this, it may happen that Jira will present outdated data, for example in search results. In addition, regular re-indexing improves application performance.

HOW OFTEN

It is best to do it once every few weeks. However, if you make major configuration changes, you can do it even every weekend. It’s good to know that if your changes affect only one or more projects, you can re-index only them. Moreover, each time a task is edited, Jira re-indexes it.

WHAT KIND TO CHOOSE

1. Project reindex

You already know that if the changes affect one or more projects, you limit the process only to them (link). If you want to do a global re-index, you have the following two options.

2. Background reindex

It will be done “underneath”, it is time consuming but allows you to use the application.

3. Foreground reindex

However, when you want to completely rebuild the index and you can afford a downtime, use the foreground-reindex, which is much faster. You can find both options here

OPTIMIZATION

The larger the Jira instance, the more complex the re-index topic becomes. Then, such elements as optimization of hardware resources, disk speed, appropriate database configuration and other parameters are at play. All this so that the whole process does not take 6 hours, but for example 3 or 4. If you want to explore this topic, I recommend searching on internet forums (especially Atlassian Community) and reading the documentation HERE and HERE.

Do you have a question? Suggestions? Feel free to comment.

Cheers,
Lukas

Photo author: Hans-Peter Gauster