Summary

JIRA call rest/gadget/1.0/favfilters?showCounts=true returns the total number of issues matching all favourite filters for the user.
That means it will execute and resolves all JQL (provided search criteria) in those favourites filters.
Please note that this is not a functional bug, as it works exactly as expected and code has same performance impact as if you run those JQL manually.

That being said, in some cases those JQL execution could be very expensive and due to frequent gadget refresh can cause memory pressure or even lead to OOM.
Ticket to update docs and explicitly document possible problems: JRA-64383

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create large instance (500k issue, 500 projects)
2. Create many filters for the specific user
3. (Optional) Create complex filter using 3rd party plugins
4. Trigger REST call: rest/gadget/1.0/favfilters?showCounts=true
   • Same call is triggered by Favourite Filters gadget
     

Expected Results

JIRA performs fast

Actual Results

JIRA is slow.

Notes

• Although this is documented already to be slow and non-performant, users still are using it beyond the control of administrators.
• With the performance improvements done on 6.3, this is now the slowest operation we see in our instance. We see typical loads times of 8 ~ 10 seconds when Issue Count is turned on.
• Suggestion: make showCounts=false the default for the gadget.
  • See screenshot
    

Workaround

• Disable favourite count from proxy level

   RewriteCond %\{REQUEST_METHOD} GET
   RewriteCond %\{REQUEST_URI} ^/rest/gadget/1.0/favfilters.*$ [NC]
   RewriteCond %\{QUERY_STRING} ^showCounts=true(.*)$ [NC]
   RewriteRule /rest/gadget/1.0/favfilters /rest/gadget/1.0/favfilters?showCounts=false%1 [R=302,L] 
  

• Disable for existing gadgets. Option #2. REST api (see below in comments)
• Disable Favourite Filters gadget
  • Go to: [ Administration > Manage add-ons > System add-ons > Atlassian JIRA - Plugins - Gadgets Plugin]
  • disable Favourite Filters (favourite-filters-gadget)