Creating too many custom fields – A factor in slow performance

We just discussed how companies should devise a process to manage their customizations in their JIRA instance. As the JIRA instance grows in terms of number of issues, projects, and users, the performance of the instance will start degrading over a period of time. One of the major factors that leads to slow performance is a lot of custom fields.

JIRA administrators create custom fields to store data that can be filtered out in the reports. This is fine, but an attempt should be made to reuse the existing custom fields. For this reason, create fields with generic names so that they can be reused easily in different projects.

Let's take a look at some generic custom fields that can be created in JIRA instances:

Custom field	Type	Description
Client/Customer	Select List	This uses project context to create different options for multiple projects
Category	Select List	These labels and components should be...