- Created by Johannes Laatu (Deactivated), last modified by Madzy Soetman on Feb 21, 2023
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You can speed up sites on Confluence instances that have an exceptionally high amount of spaces by manually assigning permissions to user groups at the Category and site level.
Since this approach involves manual work and upkeep, we only recommend it to customers whose Confluence instance has a complex structure, experiences performance issues, or has users in many user groups.
About permissions
By default, users can view a category when they have permission to view a space inside the category. Administrators can view all categories.
What happens under the hood is that when a user logs in, Refined is calculating which categories should be visible. This means that the more spaces and categories there are, the heavier these calculations will be, which can affect performance.
Manual Category Permissions means that instead of iterating through all the spaces to see which categories are visible, the category permissions are checked.
Note that Refined always respects Confluence permission settings on spaces: a user that is not allowed to see a space will not see the space even if they can see the category above it. Similarly, hiding a category containing a space will not hide the space to a user. If the user has a URL or searches for the space, the space will still show up if the settings on the space allows it.
Set up manual category permissions
Head to the Refined Administration > the Configuration tab.
Under the Category heading, enable Use manual category permission settings. Note that this directly affects what your see in your instance until you have set the specifications for categories for your Sites in the Site Builder.
Next, go to the Site Builder tab. Categories that don’t have category permissions set up are marked with an icon.
To set up permissions for a category, click its Cogwheel > Edit category.
Permission | Description |
|---|---|
Anonymous users | the category will show for any anonymous users (not logged in) as well as any logged-in user. |
Logged-in user | category show up when a user is logged in. |
Groups | manually add the Confluence user groups that will be allowed to see this category. |
Inherit | Use the same settings as the site has. Note that that this may result in categories being shown that do not contain any spaces. |
Refined renders the category menu based on what the user is allowed to view. This means that the amount of categories affects how long it takes to calculate the visible categories.
Using the collapsed sub-categories is a good way to enhance performance. Refined will render the top level categories and allows the user to expand the categories they wish to explore. This means that the spaces in the category are only fetched when the user decides to expand that category.
This feature is available in Theme Configuration > Navigation > Collapse Sub-categories.
When you have a large instance with many spaces or a lot of simultaneously active users, or you just want to speed things up, we recommend turning on the caching feature.
An enabled cache will make the server requests related to Refined fewer by storing the UI settings locally in the browser using the Web Storage API. This will decrease the amount of server requests and greatly improve page load times for all users.
In short, enabling caching provides these benefits:
Fewer server requests
Faster resource load times
Great potential performance gain for large instances
Smoother end user experience
Always up to date
How it works
A small cache object is made available in the beginning of each page load, checking if the cached resources are up to date or if the administrator has made any changes to the cache management settings. This way the resources are still kept updated at all times.
If a resource is cached, the user will read it locally without having to make any server requests. The resources are stored using the standardised Web Storage API, allowing for fast and efficient use across all major browsers.
Browser support
The cache system works with all supported browsers and versions. The cache management system is built with Web Storage.
Enable and set up caching
Go to the Refined Administration.
Go to the Caching tab.
Select Enable caching.
Set up Cacheable resources:
Resource API | Description | Used by |
|---|---|---|
Category REST API | Requests made for categories, the category menu and all their content. Recommended to cache if your instance has categories containing a large amount of spaces and/or subcategories. | Categories, Spaces in categories macro |
Footer REST API | The footer and all of its content. If it is not cached, this resource will be fetched on all your site’s pages. | Footer |
Global Menu REST API | The global menu, as well as the sidebar from Original Theme 4.0. If it is not cached, this resource will be fetched on all your site’s pages. | Global menu |
User Category REST API | All requests associated with the functionality of linking users to categories, including the roles defined for them. | Connecting Users to Categories and Spaces |
Users REST API | User-related requests made by Refined’s user macros. | User Details macro, Users Macro |
In version 6.0 of Refined for Confluence Data Center we introduced sites, making it possible to use content from one Confluence instance in several sites built on top of the instance. This opens op a whole range of new use cases for Confluence, such as intranets, knowledge bases, and documentation. It also improves performance for large/enterprise instances: as the content is divided into smaller chunks , it’s faster to fetch and render.
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