In the release 3.5, we have introduced the back-end indexation. How should an administrator choose between the two indexation engines?
What is the recommended setting?
Asynchronous indexing is the only recommended setting. It weighs less on the performance of Confluence.
What is the indexing mode?
When a user enters requirements on a page and saves it, the indexation engine extracts requirements from text, tables and layouts, and put it in a database.
What is the Legacy JS mode?
Up until version 3.4, requirements would be extracted while they were displayed for the first time. It would produce two side-effects:
- When saving the page, the user would have to wait until we've identified all requirements on the page. It would be seamless and very fast for small pages, but it could be long when there are hundreds of requirements.
- The Javascript that would extract the requirements from the page, running while the user views the page, was designed to simplify the extracted text. With time, we couldn't change it, because some customers rely on the comparability of extracted texts across versions of requirements. Also, since it was rendered at runtime, there could be slight differences in text that made comparisons difficult.
What is the new mode, "Asynchronous indexing"?
When a page is saved and the new mode is selected, we don't process it immediately. Rather, we put it in a queue (the same mechanism we are already using to send events to Jira) and we process it whenever Confluence is available.
- It means saving the page is much faster,
- It also means we had to rewrite the indexation engine and, this time, we've correctly supported bullet-point lists, tables, images, etc.
Of course, since this is a new engine, it may happen that we've missed some text formatting, so please give us feedback if you see any text format that you would like to be supported.
Why did it have to change?
Atlassian's Data Center line of products aims for enterprise-level quality. Mostly, performance was an issue for the user experience, and we needed the users to be able to instantly save the page and view it. Secondly, dealing with HTML is difficult and often introduces whitespaces changes even when the original text hasn't changed. Using the new indexation will result in much more deterministic outputs.
Is there an impact to changing modes?
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Should an existing customer switch to the new mode?
New customers should be on the new mode. What about existing customers?
Existing customers should use the new mode, for the performance.Status colour Green title Yes
Check whether your users rely on baselines. If they do, do they expect to compare requirements across baselines? If so, keep the Legacy JS mode.Status colour Green title but verify
Given the above item, we have choosen that existing customers will have the Legacy JS mode by default. Only administrators who wish to move to the new mode will do it manually.Status colour Green title Default
Did we answer all your questions?
Feel free to ask questions on https://support.requirementyogi.com.