In particular a place I used to work had a plugin for threaded comments in Jira. The specific one we were using slowed things down noticeably with the DB on the same server, but not too much to be an improvement in overall usefulness.

Then we decided trying to make our Jira more reliable by splitting the DB out into a separate clustered DB system in the same data center. The latency difference going through a couple of switches and to another system really added up with those extra 1600 or so DB calls per page load.

We ended up doing an emergency reversion to an on-host DB. Later, we figured out what was causing that many queries.

You're referring to the on-prem Jira. That might suck, sure. My experience has been purely using Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud, both of which I've found to be snappy and responsive.

Amusingly, exactly opposite experience here. That said, our on-prem is jira and confluence integrated with db on same machine, and apache in front doing additional caching. I imagine like so many things it is how you set it up...

If you read my previous comment, I said it was largely the specific poor plugin that caused most of the performance issue with the database queries. I never complained about the overall speed of on-prem Jira. That was the assertion of the person who’s only ever used the cloud version.

My last company switched several teams to Jira Cloud. My current company started with Cloud when we moved over from other tools.

Cloud does not give you the flexibility of your own plugins, your own redundancy design, or your own server upgrades. On top of that, the performance is pretty variable and is far worse than a self-hosted Jira on fast hardware.

It’s interesting to me that your lack of experience to make a comparison qualifies you in some way to criticize the experience I actually have.