Using Confluence as a large file sharing platform

[Jason Plumhoff]

We're running Confluence on a virtual machine - Xeon X5560, 4GB of RAM, Windows server datacenter (64-bit). Aside from the normal wiki use, we're trying to use it as a platform for sharing files with customers and allowing them to upload files for us. Everything worked fine as long as the files were relatively small (<1MB). But now our customer service group has started uploading PDF files 100-200MB in size. They are reporting that on larger files, Confluence appears to freeze and become completely unresponsive. Sometimes our IT group ends up rebooting the server to resolve the issue.

I've recently restricted indexing to documents of 4MB or less. What else should we do (if anything) to address this?

Thanks,

Jason

[Jason Plumhoff · Accepted solution]

Just to close out this question - We were able to resolve our issues by:

1. restricted indexing to documents of 4MB
2. Turning off real time anti-virus scanning of the Confluence home directory
3. Increasing the available heap memory

Not sure what the magic bullet was, but our problem has been solved.

[stevegore]

Hi Jason, how did you restrict indexing to documents < 4MB?

[Jason Plumhoff]

Back when we did this, there was a nice write up in the Atlassian documentation site. They've changed things a bit - this is the closest I could find: https://confluence.atlassian.com/conf57/confluence-administrator-s-guide/managing-confluence-data/attachment-storage-configuration/configuring-attachment-size

[stevegore]

Thanks Jason!

[David at David Simpson Apps]

AppFusions has a solution to this that we will be releasing in early Aug/late July. If you'd like to try a beta on staging, contact us at info@appfusions.com. We can send you a trial.

When released - we will update this more.

[Bruna Griebeler]

Hi Jason, Can you please check that you increased the Max Attachment Size setting in Confluence Admin > General Configuration? The default is set to 10M. 
Additionally, is there any error showing up in you atlassian-confluence.log file located at <confluence-home>/logs like an OutOfMemory error during the time Confluence is unresponsive? Cheers 

[Jason Plumhoff]

Hi Bruna! Yes, we increased the max attachment size to just over 200MB. I haven't seen the out of memory errors, but next time it happens, I'll check.

[Martin Cleaver]

Jason - did that solve the issue for you?

Thanks, Martin.

[Jason Plumhoff]

Hi Martin, If you look at the comment I marked as an answer, you can see what worked for us. With this configuration, we've been able to transfer gigabyte files. Jason

[Martin Cleaver]

Thanks Jason - may I ask: how often and how many people download these GB files?

Is it e.g. several times a day or once a month? Do you have 1s, 10s or 100s of people accessing?

Thanks kindly, Martin.

[Jason Plumhoff]

When we were first migrating documentation to Confluence, it was several dozen files per week. Now that we've mostly got everything in, it is down to probably 5-15 uploads & downloads of this size per month. Note that the lockups were occuring during uploads - downloads didn't seem to cause any issues that we could detect.

[Martin Cleaver]

Thanks again!

[Martin Cleaver]

Jason - are you automating your uploads? I tried but hit https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-23645- thanks, M.