This page last changed on Jan 24, 2007 by noam@atlassian.com.

Deploying any application to several thousand users requires care and planning, expecially if those users are going to be relying on the application to get their work done.

General Advice

Staged Rollout

Do not try to deploy Confluence immediately to your whole organisation. Instead, roll it out department by department, or project by project.

How Confluence will scale given a particular software and hardware configuration depends very much on how Confluence is likely to be used in your organisation. Launching Confluence to everybody at once may seem like a neat idea, but it also means that any problems you might experience scaling the system up to your entire organisation will hit you all at once, annoy everyone and possibly hurt adoption.

Rolling Confluence out gradually will give you the chance to tune it as you go, resulting in a much more painless experience. There will also be organisational advantages: you can identify those teams or projects who are most likely to be successful 'early adopters', and those teams can experiment with how best a wiki might suit your organisation, and pass on their 'best wiki practices' as usage of Confluence expands.

Configuring your Application Server, Web Server and Database

Because Confluence can be deployed in so many server combinations, we do not currently have guides on the best tuning parameters for each individual server. We will be happy to provide support, however. If you have any tuning parameters that you find particularly useful for Confluence instances, feel free to share them with other Confluence users in the Confluence Community space.

Things to Keep an Eye On

Memory Usage

The Java virtual machine is configured with a "maximum heap size" that limits the amount of memory it will consume. If Confluence fills up this maximum heap size it will run out of memory, and start behaving unpredictably. You can keep track of Confluence's memory usage from the System Information screen of the administration console:

This example shows that, at the time of writing, confluence.atlassian.com is using 173MB of an allocated 313MB of heap. (The JVM was configured with a maximum heap size of 450MB, but this information is not available in the graph. The 313MB figure shows that the full 450MB of heap has not yet been needed)

Database Connection Pool

Confluence will need a database connection for each simultaneous user connection to the server. It is also a good idea to have 5-10 connections spare for Confluence internal processes such as backups, re-indexing or daily notification jobs.

Running out of pooled connections will cause the server to slow down as more users are waiting for a connection to be freed before starting their own request, and will eventually cause visible system errors as Confluence times out waiting for a database connection.

If you are using Confluence's internal connection pool, you can increase the number of available connections by modifying the hibernate.c3p0.max_size property in {confluence_home}/confluence-cfg.xml, and restarting Confluence. Make sure you have also configured your database to be able to support that many simultaneous connections.

Cache Sizes

The Performance Tuning page includes some useful rules of thumb for configuring the sizes of Confluence's internal caches.


memory-usage.png (image/png)

Do you have some examples of large installation and the associated volume ? This is an explicit question from our Corporate IT to go further.

We would like to know who has some of the largest user base, pages, some statistics, ...

When can we expect to see problems arise ? Where is the break point ?

Thanks for any help.

Posted by didier.boulet@gmail.com at Apr 14, 2006 08:09

We know that some of our customers run Confluence with 10,000 and more users and we haven't had much complains about performance with such a large user base. Unfortunately we don't have any detailed information about the amount of pages or the raw volume of data stored in Confluence on such big instances and therefore are unable to provide statistics on that.

However, you might want to try and contact some other customers directly via the forums [1] or the user mailing list [2] to hear from their experiences.

Cheers,
Jens

[1] http://forums.atlassian.com/
[2] http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/mailinglist.jsp

Posted by jens@atlassian.com at Apr 18, 2006 03:14

Any word on the availability of "Massive"?

Posted by honconftest at Aug 27, 2006 01:18

Version 2.3 will be released in the next 4-6 weeks.

Posted by tom@atlassian.com at Aug 27, 2006 18:04

Excellent, thank you. I assume that, for single node users, it's an upgrade covered by annual maint costs, and that, for load balance users, there'll be an additional fee. Would it be safe to assume that the cost will be similar to that of purchasing another full Unlimited license?

Thank you.

Posted by honconftest at Aug 28, 2006 10:25

Firstly, I want to point out that we have not yet published or completely finalised pricing for Confluence Massive. However, as we are very close, I thought I'd share with you where we are currently at.

At this point in time it is likely that Confluence Massive will be priced at USD $16,000 for a two node, unlimited user license commercial license. Like all of our commercial licenses this will be a perpetual license with 12 months of maintenance (support and updates). The commercial license will also include source access (licensed under the terms of our EULA). Confluence Massive maintenance renewals will be priced at USD $8,000.

Additional Nodes (extra nodes in addition to the 2 nodes already included with the Confluence Massive base license) can also be purchased for any Confluence Massive cluster. Our current plan is that additional, commercially licensed nodes will cost USD $8,000. If one or more Additional Nodes are purchased in a single transaction at the same time as the Confluence Massive license, customers will be entitled to our multiple purchase discount. Maintenance renewals for Additional Nodes will be priced at USD $4,000 per Additional Node.

Upgrade pricing is yet to be finalised but we do know that only a single existing Confluence license can be eligible for any single upgrade (you can't cash in 3 Confluence licenses for a Confluence Massive license for example).

Confluence Massive will not be available in a single node as this will serve no additional functionality to Confluence Unlimited. At this time, clustering will only be available in unlimited user license configurations.

Posted by noam@atlassian.com at Aug 29, 2006 00:18

Good information, thank you for sharing!

Posted by honconftest at Aug 29, 2006 11:35

Any update on the release of v2.3? I have a large customer that really needs the clustering features.

Posted by robert.cottingham@perficient.com at Dec 12, 2006 11:25

We're aiming to have it out in 4-6 weeks. In the meantime, you can get acquainted with it using the development version available at http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/DevReleaseDownloads.jspa

Posted by nicholas@atlassian.com at Dec 12, 2006 15:36
Document generated by Confluence on Mar 22, 2007 20:55