Remember previous version's JVM parameters and other Confluence settings so that an admin does not need to reapply the settings again in the upgraded version

Create a way for Confluence to remember its JVM parameters or previous settings (eg. LDAP) so that the same parameters or configurations do not need to be added/applied again in the upgraded version.

At the moment when one sets a JVM parameter for Confluence, eg. Xmx, permgen, etc. the value will not be carried over to the new upgraded version. The same goes for Confluence settings eg. atlassian-user.xml this has to be done manually all over again.

A customer gave a good comment on this matter:

I now realize we went through this same support issue before! Increasing permgen size.

You can search our history. But what happened is that it was lost in the upgrade (we didn't merge it over).
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Although the way Conf/JIRA upgrades are done is our #1 complaint about Conf/JIRA. The upgrade process is so painful we dread doing Conf/JIRA upgrades and put them off for six months or a year sometimes.

Having to hand merge over files seems completely anachronistic.

Settings like permgensize and database and user authentication should live OUTSIDE the install folder and thus should survive an upgrade. It is hard to comprehend the way you do it, how people accept merging that stuff over by hand even for the most minor upgrade. It makes for a horrible user experience.

The bottom line is you probably expect IT professional will admin this stuff. We are software engineers but not IT professional. So our expectations are very different. I would expect an upgrade to be automatic and never required hand editing anything.
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Those are our standing complaints: upgrades and memory settings. Once it's up and running we like Conf & JIRA, they are good products overall, just the admin/install part is lacking.