Improperly or poorly configured Automation can have an impact on performance.
Another source of performance load can be the use of Progress column, Totals columns and Formula columns. The Jira fields by themselves used in columns have little impact on performance, as they are loaded only for the structure elements which are currently displayed, plus a number of items below and above (to ensure smoother scrolling).
But for progress, totals and some formulas, the values will be loaded for the entire hierarchy, because such columns aggregate data across the entire hierarchy. For structures with thousands of issues, this can become noticeable; however, it is still much less of an impact when compared to loading the hierarchy itself.
If you have a really large instance and your structures will contain thousands of issues, a good practice is to set up a staging server with a snapshot of data, so users can try building their structures there first. In our experience, 80% of the situations where there were some performance issues happened while the users were experimenting with Automation and built really large and complex structures by mistake. |
Users can see structures on the main Structure Board, accessible through the top Jira menu; on Jira dashboards; project page and also on the Issue Page. Opening a structure built with the use of automation in any of these locations will require generation of this structure. This is pretty obvious for the main Structure Board or the Dashboard, but less intuitive for the Issue Page.
For this reason, the default structures you select can have a significant impact on overall performance. If a really large structure is selected as the default structure for a project, whenever a user opens the Issue Page for an issue from this project, this large structure will be loaded. For high-traffic projects, this may affect the performance quite significantly. It is recommended to use smaller and simpler structures as your default structures. To learn more about selecting the default structure for the Issue Page, see Structure Options for the Issue Page.
You can also remove the Structure widget from the Issue Page completely.
Another non-explicit structure loading will happen if you use S-JQL - an extension for JQL that allows you to run structure-based queries. Every time such a query is executed, the structure that is used in the query will be loaded. If you create some saved filter with S-JQL for a large structure and use it heavily somewhere, this may start affecting performance too.