Issue Summary

The error "Request header is too large" occurs immediately after upgrading Jira from 8.13.2 to 8.17.1 There were no changes in data or configuration. Editing a workflow was not possible and trigger the error . It seems that the new version require more header space than the previous version.

The related URL

https://base-url/secure/project/SelectProjectWorkflowSchemeStep3.jspa?...)
 

Steps to Reproduce

Not easy to reproduce, depend on Instance data and configuration

Expected Results

The new Jira version should work as the previous version

Actual Results

The below exception is thrown in the log file:

13-Sep-2021 05:33:48.569 INFO [https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-47] org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.service Error parsing HTTP request header
 Note: further occurrences of HTTP request parsing errors will be logged at DEBUG level.
	java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Request header is too large
		at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11InputBuffer.parseHeaders(Http11InputBuffer.java:617)
		at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.service(Http11Processor.java:525)
...

• The related URL

  https://base-url/secure/project/SelectProjectWorkflowSchemeStep3.jspa?...)
  

Workaround

1- On Jira server, increase the Tomcat header size to 16834 in your "server.xml" file

maxHttpHeaderSize="16834"

This change requires a node restart and should be applied to all nodes ( you can restart the nodes in round robin to avoid downtime}

2- If you are using Proxy/Reverse Proxy, you will need to adjust the maxHttpHeaderSize on it as well.

Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#limitrequestline
Nginx: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#large_client_header_buffers

As best practices we suggest  to first test those changes  in a test/staging environment prior to rolling out any changes to a production environment.