The latest release of the commercial bug tracking system, JIRA 5.1, is the "fastest JIRA yet" according to its creators, Atlassian. The release notes explains that the previous "soft limit" of 200,000 issues has been removed thanks to a 40% improvement in performance; a new scaling guide provides more information.

Performance in the issue trackers backend is also more managable, with an "Advanced" database connection tuning tab and database monitoring pages for administrators. Queries that return thousands of issues should also be faster, as will mentioning other JIRA users in issue descriptions or comments.

Users will notice the new inline editing support for modifying an issue field most of all when using JIRA 5.1. This comes with its own keyboard shortcuts and is enabled by default on new installs. The developers have also reduced the number of page reloads in the browser to make things feel faster.

Other additions include a web page embeddable issue collector to gather new issues from non-JIRA users and customers, improvements to project administration, the ability to now deactivate (and reactivate) a user while preserving their history, autowatch on comments, automatic timezone detection and faster login. Finally, JIRA 5.1 now supports Gravatars in user profiles.

JIRA 5.1 is available as a free trial. Prices start from $10/month for 10 users and $50/month for 11-15 users on the hosted version. The downloaded version is available on a starter licence of $10 for 10 users, while full licences start at $1,200 for 11-25 users. Appropriately qualified open source projects can apply for a free licence.

(djwm)