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  • Created by Unknown User (johnsonli), last modified on Mar 13, 2020

These are considered best practices for managing your project's attachments in a multi-tenant enterprise environment.  In general excessive attachments can be the cause of degraded performance which stems more from indexing than direct I/O speed.  This article helps you understand how to keep your attachments prune and be how to be a good neighbor.

Confluence is a wiki editing tool; it is easier to manage document drafting and editing directly on screen rather than downloading/uploading documents because every user is always viewing or editing the most current version.

If you do have to use file attachments, let Confluence archive the old versions - you can still access them via the Attachment page, but again, even having a link on the main page will ALWAYS point to the latest version of the attachment.  The trick here is to stop humans doing things such as changing the file name with some adhoc user-made-up suffix.  Leave the file name EXACTLY as it was and Confluence will just archive the old version when a new version is uploaded.

Use real file names for attachments.  Do not use system default screen shot names.  Why?

  • It breaks the internal version control – each screen capture has a new file name so previous images are stored forever
  • It breaks the ability for reuse - other pages cannot search for a file in the space for reuse if they are all named "Screen Shot ..." It forces the editor to have to open the file and view it first


Performance Nuggets

  • By default, the maximum attachment size is 10MB.
  • If the connection to the storage isn't lightning quick then you may experience significant performance issues as a result, (not just in accessing attachments but also indexing them etc).
  • The application will need to index every attachment and this could put immense strain on the instance, (even if it's only indexing the file names and not the contents), because the indexing of large attachments requires that the attachment be loaded into memory. In the case of large attachments, this can cause a temporary strain on the systems resources, and may result in indexing failing because the attachment could not be fully loaded into memory.


Step-by-step guide

  1. Let Confluence do the attachment versioning for you.  When you download an attachment for editing and you are ready to upload it back to your page, keep the original name of the attachment.  Do not change the name by adding a version tag or any other suffix.  Confluence will archive the previous attachment when you upload the updated document (provided the names are an exact match). All name changes, version tags, or added suffix will make the original document an orphan and you will lose history from within Confluence, not to mention increasing the number of attachments on your page.
  2. Did you know that when you add an image to a page it is stored as an attachment to the page?  If you add an image to your page and that image becomes obsolete, when you add a replacement image, please delete the obsolete one from the page attachments.  It's basically an orphan at this point, so please delete it.
  3. Use hyperlinks to the attachments by searching for the attachment in the link popup; it will always point to the current version.




The information contained herein is proprietary to Leidos, Inc. It may not be used, reproduced, disclosed, or exported without the written approval of Leidos.
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