This page last changed on Dec 02, 2009 by pfragemann.

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.

Peak visitors are the maximum number of browsers simultaneously making requests to access or update the Confluence server. Visitors are counted from their first page request until the connection is closed and if public access is enabled, this includes internet visitors as well as logged in users. Storage requirements will vary depending on how many pages and attachments you wish to store inside Confluence.

Minimum Hardware Requirements

On small instances, server load is primarily driven by peak visitors.

5 Concurrent Users

  • 2GHz+ CPU
  • 512MB RAM
  • 5GB database space

25 Concurrent Users

  • Quad 2GHz+ CPU
  • 2GB+ RAM
  • 10GB database space
Please be aware that while some of our customers run Confluence on SPARC-based hardware, Atlassian only officially supports Confluence running on x86 hardware and 64-bit derivatives of x86 hardware.

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) Notes
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 4,048  
21,000 950   2 3.6 4,048  
85,000
100
12,500
4
2.6
4,048
3 machines total: application server, database server, Apache HTTPD + LDAP tunnel server. See Accenture's slides and video for full details

Server Load & Scalability

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

  • The editor to viewer ratio is how many visitors are performing updates versus those only viewing content
  • Total content is best estimated by a count of total spaces

Confluence scales best with a steady flow of visitors rather than defined peak visitor times, few editors and few spaces. Users should also take into account:

As mentioned on the documentation for Operating Large or Mission-Critical Confluence Installations, some important steps are loadtesting your usecase and monitoring the system continuously to find out where your system could do better and what might need to improve in order to scale further.

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 use either the database or filesystem. For example, the wiki instance you are reading now uses approximately 1 GB of database space and 9.4 GB of disk space.

Here is a breakdown of the disk usage requirements for this wiki, as at December 2008:

Database size 1003 MB
Home directory size 9.4 GB
Size of selected database tables
Data Rows Size
Content bodies (incl. all versions of blogs, pages and comments) 170462 145 MB
Content metadata (incl. title, author) 188697 48 MB
Content and user properties 193652 42 MB
Users 20679 5.8 MB
Attachment metadata 25718 5.0 MB
Labels 43235 4.5 MB

Note: not all database tables or indexes are shown, and average row size may vary between instances.

Size of selected home directory components
Data Files Size
Attachments (incl. all versions) 27484 5.9 GB
Usage index (now disabled) 240 2.6 GB
Search index 10 236 MB
Office Connector cache 44 222 MB
Temporary files 7269 201 MB
Plugin files 1508 139 MB
Thumbnails 10154 84 M
Did-you-mean search index 3 9.9 MB

Note: not all files are shown, and average file size may vary between instances.

Private & Online Comparison

Private instances manage their users either internally or through a user repository such as LDAP, while online instances have public signup enabled and must handle the additional load of anonymous internet visitors. Please keep in mind that these are examples only, not recommendations:

Use Case Spaces User
Accounts
Editors Editor To
Viewer Ratio
Pages Page Revisions Attachments Comments Total Data
Size (GB)
Notes
Online Documentation 140 11,500 1,000 9% 8,800 65,000 7,300 11,500 10.4  
Private Intranet 130 180 140 78% 8,000 84,000 3,800 500 4.5  
Company-Wide Collaboration
100
85,000
1,000+
1%+
12,500
120,000
15,000
    Accenture - see slides and video for full details

Professional Assistance

For large instances, it may be worthwhile contacting an Atlassian partner for expertise on hardware sizing, testing and performance tuning. Simply contact a local partner directly or email our partner manager for a recommendation.

Related Pages

Powered By Confluence
Example Size & Hardware Specifications From Customer Survey
Managing Application Server Memory Settings
Confluence Clustering Overview
Operating Large or Mission-Critical Confluence Installations
Performance Testing Scripts
Confluence Installation Guide
Document generated by Confluence on Dec 10, 2009 18:41