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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

My biggest complaint with all of the Atlassian tools I use (Jira, Confluence, etc.) is how slow and unresponsive they feel. Creating a new Issue requires waiting at least a few seconds, sometimes more, for the newly created Issue to pop up on the bottom left. Editing a Confluence doc requires clicking the edit button and waiting a few seconds while the entire page does, what appears to be, some massive shift to editing mode (understandable that there would be big differences between read and write mode, that's not my issue). I think my perception of and feeling towards the Atlassian tools I use would be, no exaggeration, 10x more positive if everything just felt zippy and close to instantaneous. "Speed is a feature", or however the aphorism goes.

Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to https://ifuckinghatejira.com/ (for the lulz)

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Besides being slow as shit Jira and Confluence have terrible UIs. None of the controls are clear, it's hard to tell the difference between a clickable thing or a typeable thing. Then there's just nowhere you can place the cursor on the same screen that doesn't make something animate or change color.

A mystery meat UI is bad enough but a slow mystery meat UI is just infuriating.

> it's hard to tell the difference between a clickable thing or a typeable thing.

Or both at once, because the description on a ticket isn't a text field until you click it and then it becomes typable (oh, you weren't trying to select text, were you?).

I'll add to this that their markdown is all over the place, and different between the products.

Right! I didn't even mention the actual UI, but I agree. There's no cohesion, nothing feels intuitive. It all kind of feels like it was designed by engineers/developers honestly :)

We use confluence and jira, an d for some reason it seems perfectly usable compared to others stories here. It's not a small organization either, so I wonder if it's some misconfiguration that's killing performance for others?

It is 100% possible that it's a config thing... but I've used Jira on-prem with a fairly complex setup and in the cloud hosted version with what I believe to be the simplest out-of-the-box setup it has and both were terrible at performance, so... if Atlassian themselves can't tune it right, I'm comfortable saying it's just bad (or at least) software.

EDIT: Someone else in the comments suggested that the cloud version is slower than on-prem. This might account for things; if I've only seen complex on-prem and simple cloud, it might well be that simple on-prem can be fast. But... that's still concluding that Atlassian themselves can't make their own software performant, so it's not exactly a redeeming quality.

We had a pretty complex on-prem Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket/Bamboo setup with pretty good performance, at least good enough that it wasn't something we thought or complained about. We also managed and used cloud installation for customers, those pretty much always felt slower. We did have a fairly large number of Atlassian certified people in the company, all of which are probably A-tier when it comes to managing Jira, so that might have helped our on-prem performance. It's not like we had massive database and application servers running the software, but we might very well have thrown more hardware at it than Atlassian does per client.

Have you used other tools like linear? The performance difference is striking.

Atlassian tools are decent enough, and mostly usable is how I'd describe them. I'd take anything else though, even Rally.

I have. Linear is great, although I didn't use it as extensively as Jira. Wish we could use it.

It could be a plug-in. But anecdotally I’ve also heard the cloud version is much worse than on-prem, which if true could explain the big differences too.

I’ve used both Jira and Confluence on premise and Atlassian Cloud. For what you pay (when you pay), the cloud service performance is an absolute joke. It’s god awful slow compared to alternatives, even with small orgs and datasets.

> We use confluence and jira, an d for some reason it seems perfectly usable compared to others stories here.

I've been using Jira Cloud off and on at various startups and it always had its slow moments. At my most recent startup, it's been working very well with no slowness thay I'm aware of (knocks on wood), and that includes all of the stuff I do directly via API.

That's quite possible! I'd love to know what it is. If it's somehow a consequence of the total number and age of stories since our account's beginning, I'm not sure what we could really do about that other than to do bulk deleting which...we really don't want to do.

javascript from every installed plug-in ends up in batch.js and first loads for the day are slow if you use plugins in your instance.

This times 1000. We use an XRay plugin for JIRA to create tests, test runs, executions etc. I shudder every time I need to go into XRay's TCR (Test Case Repository) which isn't even that large (~3k tests in total). The amount of "desync error, please refresh" is bad when viewing but goes absolutely bonkers when actually creating or editing tests. Not to mention that the actual "writing area" takes maybe 1/4 of the screen estate. I hate this so much in the modern web applications - "Here we have this whole screen... let's make 25% of it actually usable and put useless crap on the rest."

Sorry, I suppose I had to vent as JIRA makes my blood boil.

They're a text book example of the Inner-platform effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

They want everything to be WYSIWYG and in consequence re-implement almost every browser feature in JavaScript, which breaks everything which relies on the native features. Every time I click on a text area, the cursor disappears. It works if I tab into the text area. Infuriating. And for this it downloads 10MB of JavaScript.

Great phenomenon/term to know. And yeah the disappeared cursor is absolutely maddening.

Yup, that was my first thought reading the title: No, my manager is fine, I actually like the workflow, I like the process; it is very much the implementation of jira that I hate for taking good ideas and making them slow, buggy, and unintuitive.

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