Summary

In some situations, the user cache in Jira may become corrupt and require manual intervention to resolve it, sometimes it is just for one user, recently I had a ticket where the cache was invalidated and only one valid, internal user was giving the following error:

This required us to perform a hard restart on the entire cluster, for one user! This was a service account that is used to perform a sync with Jira Align, so it was a very important user.

There are a few ways to work around this:

• Refresh caches by full Jira restart (very painful and requires an outage):
  • Full restart in Data Center is required because nodes with a corrupted cache will replicate it to other starting nodes, this means shutting down all nodes, validating the service is stopped, and starting them back up, a rolling restart will not resolve this issue.

• Add new directory, sync it, remove the 1st one (very painful and can be confusing and complicated):

1. Create a new user directory with exact same settings as Directory ID: 10000 (name: Active Directory server
2. Synchronize with this new directory
3. Move this new directory to top position (the first directory to be checked)
4. Test user access
5. Remove old directory(id:10000)

Suggested fix:

Offer a programmatic way to rebuild the cache for just one user, i.e. grab the user information from the database and add it back to the cache (perhaps a direct query by a username you enter manually)