After upgrading to Confluence 5.8.16, we could not see this issue anymore!

@Atlassian: Could you please verify, if there was any fix on this? I would really like to have a reliable information if this is resolved or if we just fixed it by any custom setting we did?

Are there any news on this critical issue?

Hi Alain,

yes that's the problem: a page containing a section macro without a column macro inside, but with content directly in the body of the section macro. In our large installation, those pages need many seconds, sometimes minutes to load. So, the use tries again and again to load that page what leads to a serious increase of CPU utilization and JDBC connections.
In our case it is necessary to prevent users from trying to open such pages. We are working on a script to find-out those pages and fix the storage format directly in the database by wrapping the content with the column macro.

Regards,
Mascha

@Mascha 7 @all,

We're also affected by this issue. May I ask though, on when you see issues with the section macro loading slowly, do those examples have columns within them?

We discovered that affected pages were those that had sections without columns inside them. Those pages loaded much quicker by adding a simple empty column inside sections, as a workaround - this didn't affect that layout at all either.

Not ideal but it was a workaround that worked for us. Post upgrade to 5.7, we actually ended up scripting blank columns into sections that didn't contain any.

I'd be keen to hear if that works for you.

Rgds,
Alain.

I hope Atlassian team understands the criticality of this issue and provides the fix at the earliest. Though it may seem strange, single page with a section macro without a column macro can bring down our application.

Atlassian, what can we do to raise some awareness about this issue?
Today users again managed to almost crash our instance due to this bug!

On behalf of now 155,000 users I request a *workaround to set a column macro via database query inside all pages where it is missing and the section macro is used! Additionally, there has to be a warning when pasting the section macro like: 'Please make sure that you add a column macro inside the section macro. If you do not do so, this application can crash..'

@Brian Boyle
Please change the priority to Major! This is not a minor problem, and when it is major for Confluence On-Demand it is major for Confluence Server, too.
Thanks.

We have encountered the same (or similar) issue when load testing 5.7.

We only see significant performance degradation, however, if there are any attachments/images included within the section macro itself. Sections with plain text or other simple macros didn't exhibit the issue. We also found that adding a simple blank column anywhere in the section reduced the load time to a level equal to that of any other normal page.

Possibly a variation, or further narrowed down into the same bug?

Are there any news regarding this issue? When will it be fixed?