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This page last changed on Jul 16, 2007 by david.soul@atlassian.com.

Server administrators can use this guide in combination with the free Confluence trial period to evaluate their server hardware requirements. Because server load is difficult to predict, live testing is the best way to determine what hardware a Confluence instance will require in production.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

On small instances, server load is primarily driven by the peak number of anonymous or logged-in clients browsing or editing Confluence simultaneously.

5 Concurrent Users

1GHz+ CPU Pentium 4 or equivalent
256MB RAM
5GB database space

25 Concurrent Users

Dual 2.4GHz CPU Pentium Xeon or equivalent
512MB+ RAM
10GB database space

Example Hardware Specifications

These are example hardware specifications for non-clustered Confluence instances. It not recorded whether the RAM refers to either total server memory or memory allocated to the JVM, while blank settings indicate that the information was not provided.

Accounts	Spaces	Pages	CPUs	CPU (GHz)	RAM (Meg)
150	30	1,000	1	2.6	1,024
350	100	15,000	2	2.8	700
5,000	500		4	3	2,024
10,000	350	16,000	2	3.8	2,024
10,000	60	3,500	2	3.6	512
21,000	950		2	3.6	4,048

Server Load & Scalability

When planning server hardware requirements for your Confluence deployment, you will need to estimate the server scalability based on peak concurrent users, the editor to viewer ratio and total content.

Peak concurrent users is the maximum number of clients ever simultaneously browsing or editing Confluence, even if anonymous
The editor to viewer ratio is how many clients are performing updates to versus those only viewing content
Total content is best estimated by a count of total spaces

Confluence scales best with a low peak user load, few editors and few spaces. Users should also take into account:

Total pages is not a major consideration for performance. For example, instances hosting 80K of pages can consume under 512 meg of memory
Always use an external database

Maximum Reported Usages

These values are largest customer instances reported to Atlassian or used for performance testing. Clustering for load balancing, database tuning and other performance tuning is recommended for instances exceeding these values.

Most Spaces	1700
Most Internal Users	15K
Most LDAP Users	100K
Most Pages	80K

Hard Disk Requirements

All wiki content is stored in the database, while attachments be use either the database or filesystem. For example, this wiki instance uses approximately 13GB of database.

Private & Online Comparison

Private instances manage their users through a user repository such as LDAP, while online instances have public signup enabled and must handle the additional load of anonymous internet visitors.

Use Case	Spaces	User Accounts	Editors	Editor To Viewer Ratio	Pages	Page Revisions	Attachments	Comments	Database Size (GB)
Online Documentation	140	11,500	1,000	9%	8,800	65,000	7,300	11,500	13.0
Private Intranet	130	180	140	78%	8,000	84,000	3,800	500	4.5

Clustering In Confluence