The recommendations in this guide may not fit all situations and your mileage may vary.
System requirements & considerations
Hardware considerations
CPU and memory
For Bamboo, the minimum CPU and memory requirements depend on the size and complexity of your plans. You need to consider:
- Will your builds have functional tests as part of the plans?
- Are your plans executed simultaneously? If so, how many plans will be running at any given time?
- What are the requirements for your running builds, for example do they need large amounts of memory/disk/swap space?
- How many users will be using Bamboo at any given time? Like any web application, the system resource needed is proportional to the load experienced by the server.
- How many local agents do you plan on running?
See also:
| User scenario | Usage profile | Bamboo server |
|---|---|---|
Individual user/ Small team |
| 4 core, 2 GB RAM |
| Medium team |
| 8 core, 4 GB RAM, remote agent use |
Multiple small teams/ Large team |
| 8 core, 8 GB RAM, more remote agents |
Multiple large teams/ Department/Division |
| 16 core, 8 GB RAM, all remote agents |
Storage
The Bamboo installation size is approximately 140MB, however, Bamboo's storage requirements depend upon its usage pattern during use. The usage pattern depends on factors such as:
- How many plans you will run
- How many tests each plan will execute
- How many artifacts you are going to have and their size
Atlassian recommends that you allocate about 20GB on top of the Bamboo installation size, and evaluate your usage patterns. Where usage is likely to grow, consider adding additional storage.
Software requirements
Bamboo is a pure Java application and should run on any platform, provided all the JDK requirements are satisfied.
The Supported Platforms page lists the server and client software, and their versions, supported by Bamboo 5.13.x.
Browser
Disabling JavaScript in your browser, or using a script blocking tool like NoScript, will limit access to Bamboo's full functionality. JavaScript should be enabled.
Java
Bamboo requires the full Java Developers Kit (JDK) platform to be installed on your server's operating system.
Application server
Bamboo is a web application that requires an application server. Currently Apache Tomcat is supported. Tomcat is a stable, lightweight and fast performing application server, however, please note the following:
- Deploying multiple Atlassian applications in a single Tomcat container is not supported. We do not test this configuration and upgrading any of the applications (even for point releases) is likely to break it. There are also a number of known issues with this configuration (see this FAQ for more information).
- We also do not support deploying multiple Atlassian applications to a single Tomcat container for a number of practical reasons. Firstly, you must shut down Tomcat to upgrade any application and secondly, if one application crashes, the other applications running in that Tomcat container will be inaccessible.
- Finally, we recommend not deploying any other applications to the same Tomcat container that runs Bamboo, especially if these other applications have large memory requirements or require additional libraries in Tomcat's
libsubdirectory.
Database
Bamboo requires a relational database to store its data. Bamboo supports most popular relational database servers, so we suggest using the one that you are most comfortable with administering. Bamboo ships pre-configured with an integrated HSQL database for evaluation purposes only. Since HSQLDB is prone to database corruption, we recommend configuring an external database for production environments.
Hence, if you intend to use Bamboo in a production environment, we strongly recommend that you connect Bamboo to a supported enterprise database system.
Other considerations
Bamboo also requires a number of services for efficient operation. You need to consider:
- The database connection pool size.
- The number of local agents.
- The number of remote or elastic agents.
Database connection pool size
The number of database connections available to Bamboo is the lower of two values: your DBMS connection limit and the configured Bamboo connection pool size. From Bamboo 4.2 and later, the Bamboo connection pool size has a default value of 100.
For a small to medium instances (~5 concurrent users, ~5 busy/building local agents, 20 remote agents, 50 plans), the default values are sufficient.
You should increase the connection limit if you notice UI freezes or general sluggish UI performance. Do not decrease the number of available connections below 25.
Note: having too many connections available to Bamboo carries no performance penalty as long as your DBMS can handle the load.
The following formula gives a rough estimate of the number of database connections that will be required:
(Concurrent users)/5 + (Busy remote agents)/5 + (Local agents)*1.1 + (Amount of concurrent change detections)
For example, an instance with:
- 5 concurrent users
- 30 busy remote (or elastic) agents
- 30 busy local agents
- 60 plans with repository polling set to 60 second intervals (assume 3 seconds per change detection)
would require 1 + 6 + 33 + 3 = 43 connections.
Bamboo ships with a pre-configured connection limit, however this can be modified by editing the following value in your bamboo.cfg.xml file:
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">100</property>
Local agents considerations
If you run more than 5 concurrently building local agents, you'll probably need to adapt the connection limit because each busy local agent requires a live database connection.
Also, note that large amounts of busy (building) local agents can negatively influence the performance of a Bamboo server (and other services running on that host).
Remote and elastic agent considerations
Remote and elastic agents do not require special database connection settings.