I raised this question already on the users mailing list and filled a bug reports months ago. Since I got no response yet and consider my issue a pretty severe one I am reposting it to the dev list.
In version 1.482 the feature "Report root causes of UpstreamCause in log and status pages" has been added. In certain scenarios (as stated below) this is absolutely not feasible because the amount of data logged per build might become dozens of megabytes (sometimes hundreds). The result is that the jobs folder grows for several thousand builds in tens of gigabytes (within a couple of hours) which lets Jenkins hit memory limits and become unusable (even on a machine with 64GB of memory). Some more words on the scenario which shows that problem. We have a Jenkins instance with 30 executors, and about 5000 jobs. I think the specific thing is that these jobs are not independent (or slightly connected) but have a lot of up/downstream relationships. The problem is that when Jenkins hits one of the leaf jobs the list of hierarchic causes which triggered that job is tens of megabytes long (I am not attaching a full log I guess the content is pretty obvious). On the one hand because the nesting level is very high and on the other hand since there are several paths through the dependency graph. [Conceptionally it looks even weird that Jenkins tries to keep all these data in memory - but that might be more difficult to fix in the short-term.] So there is an urgent need to optionally disable that feature. As mentioned I already filled a ticket about that: https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-15747 Since this is basically making Jenkins unusable in such scenarios can this be handled with priority? - Dirk
