Problem

Whenever an issue is being indexed, Jira retrieves all registered custom field indexers and calls their addIndex() method regardless of whether the custom field has any value or not. This generates additional overhead and affects indexing time.

Solution

To mitigate it we switched Jira built-in custom fields to be indexed only when they have values assigned for a particular issue. This is done by checking the values in the customfieldvalue table.

This feature is only available in Jira Data Center 8.10 and later.
See also: Optimizing custom fields