JQL & search
Powerful query language on day one, multi-second permission-checked scans on a large instance two years in.
What people actually say
✕Permission checking can dominate JQL performance — large numbers of permission schemes and issue security schemes make working out what a user can see slow.
Source: Atlassian — JQL performance factors ↗✕A FixVersion or AffectVersion search without a project takes around 28 seconds on a normal instance and minutes on large ones.
Source: Atlassian — JRASERVER-59939 slow version JQL ↗✕Search is slow and finding past issues is harder than running grep over a notes folder.
Source: Hacker News — Jira search complaints ↗
How we'd rebuild it for you
Postgres with the right indexes and a thin SQL-builder UI for non-engineers. Saved queries are versioned views; full-text search uses tsvector with trigram indexes; permissions are a single join, not a scheme cascade. Sub-second queries on a million issues.