Issue Summary

When a user is a member of too many groups (for example 900+), the Confluence searches will show an error "We're having trouble getting your results" instead of the content matching the criteria.

These many group memberships usually result from provisioning all internal groups to Atlassian, instead of only groups used for Product Access and content permissions.

The exact number of groups that result in search failures is still not clear, but it was reproducible intermittently between 700-850 group memberships and consistently with 900 group memberships or more. The behavior seems to be affected by factors like filter used in the search (for example, "include archived content", "type" or "author") and also by the content of each instance.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Assign 900+ groups to a user
2. Login as that user and try to perform a search in Confluence

Expected Results

Search displays results matching the search criteria

Actual Results

Error message displayed:

"We're having trouble getting your results"

Workaround

The current workaround consists of reducing the amount of group memberships the user belongs to. That can be achieved by either removing the user from unnecessary groups or filtering out some of the groups provisioned to Atlassian (removing groups used internal or for other applications).

Based on some testing, the safest approach for now is to keep the max memberships for a single user under 700 groups to completely avoid the bug.