Issue
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I discovered that I have installed plugins but never used them in any job. How do plugins affect performance, disk space, etc?
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Are there any adverse effect to installed but unused plugins?
Resolution
Our recommendation is not to have installed plugins you are not using. We provide the plugin-usage plugin to better track this on the instance.
Unused plugins can indeed affect to the performance, but this depends on the plugin. For example, if you have enabled the disk-usage plugin or the JocConfigHistory plugin and you are not really interested in the information they report, then you should disabled them as we know those plugin can produce high performance issues in large Jenkins installation.
There are plugins which might not have any real impact, but if they are not used as a normal rule we recommend not to have them installed.