This page last changed on Sep 08, 2009 by alui.

JIRA is a 'web application', meaning it runs centrally on a server, and users interact with it through web browsers from any computer.

If you are considering running JIRA on VMware, please read the Running JIRA in a Virtualised Environment.

JIRA Client Requirements

1. Browser

The following browsers are recommended for use with JIRA 4:

  • Internet Explorer 7 and 8*
  • Firefox 3.x
  • Safari 4.x

* All of the main functionality will work in IE 6; however, some of the visual effects will be missing.

If you have disabled Javascript in your browser or are using a script blocker like NoScript, you will need to enable Javascript for JIRA to get the full experience JIRA has to offer.

JIRA Server Requirements

1. Hardware

During evaluation, JIRA will run well on any reasonably fast workstation computer (e.g. 1.5+ Ghz processor). Memory requirements depend on how many projects and issues you will store, but 256MB is enough for most evaluation purposes. (Note: most people start by installing JIRA Standalone on their local computer. It is easy to move JIRA to a production server later).

The hardware required to run JIRA in production depends mainly on the number of issues and users that your installation will have, as well as the maximum number of concurrent requests that the system will experience during peak hours.

  • If you are planning to have a small number of projects (10-20) with 1,000 to 5,000 issues in total and about 100-200 users, a recent server (2.8+GHz CPU) with 256-512MB of available RAM should cater for your needs.
  • If you are planning for a greater number of issues and users, adding more memory will help. We have reports that allocating 1GB of RAM to JIRA is sufficient for 100,000 issues.
  • If your system will experience a large number of concurrent requests, running JIRA on a multi-CPU machine will increase the concurrency of processing the requests, and therefore speed up the response time.

For reference, jira.atlassian.com has over 33,000 issues and over 30,000 user accounts. The system runs on a 64bit Quad processor. The server has 4 GB of memory with 1 GB dedicated to JIRA.

Please note that performance heavily depends on your usage pattern. As a general rule, if you wish to store more than 200,000 issues in JIRA we recommend that you set up separate instances of JIRA on different physical machines and split your projects and issues between the instances. You can follow the instructions on splitting a JIRA instance, if you need to convert an existing JIRA instance into multiple instances.

We would appreciate it if you let us know what hardware configuration works for you. Please create a ticket in our support system with your hardware specification and mention the number of users and issues in your JIRA installation.

JIRA requires access to a local disk for certain functionality (e.g. if JIRA does not have read and write access to disk, searching and attachments will not work).
While some of our customers run JIRA on SPARC-based hardware, Atlassian only officially supports JIRA running on x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware.

2. Operating System

JIRA runs on any operating system that supports Java (see below).

Please note:

  • If you are using Linux/UNIX: A dedicated user should be created to run JIRA, as JIRA runs as the user it is invoked under and therefore can potentially be abused. Here is an example of how to create a dedicated user to run JIRA in Linux:
    $ sudo /usr/sbin/useradd --create-home --home-dir /usr/local/jira --shell /bin/bash jira

  • If you are using IBM's i5 OS: JIRA Standalone (Tomcat) will not run due to startup script problems.

3. Java

JIRA requires the Java Developers Kit (JDK) version 5 (1.5) or later to be installed on the server. Please see Installing Java.

Currently Sun's JDK is available for Windows (32 bit + 64 bit), Solaris (SPARC + 32 bit + 64 bit) and Linux Platforms (32 bit + 64 bit). If you are a Mac OSX user, Apple also provides a specific JDK that has been optimised for its hardware and OS.

If you are running the Sun JRE version 6 (1.6), please ensure that you are running Update 10 or higher.

4. Application Server

JIRA is a web application, so requires an application server.

  • JIRA Standalone ships pre-configured with the Apache Tomcat application server, which is a stable, light weight and fast performing server.
  • JIRA WAR/EAR can be installed into any of the supported application servers (provided they are compatible with your chosen operating system and JDK). Note that manual configuration will be required.

5. Database

JIRA requires a relational database for storage of issue data. JIRA supports most relational database servers, so we suggest using the one that you are most comfortable administering.

Next Step

Install JIRA Standalone (recommended); or Install JIRA WAR/EAR.

Document generated by Confluence on Oct 06, 2009 00:26