JobConfigHistory Plugin Best Practices

Issue

JobConfigHistory Plugin is impacting the performance of the instance.
I don’t know how I should configure the JobConfigHistory Plugin
The JobConfigHistory Plugin plugin consumes a lot of disk space.
inodes are at 99% capacity on the volume with JENKINS_HOME
Saving Jenkins system configuration is very slow.

Environment

Resolution

JobConfigHistory Plugin is a plugin designed to maintain the history of what has changed in the Jenkins job configuration and the system configuration. When a save operation is performed in Jenkins, then the history of what was changed (diff) and who made the changes (user) is saved. It could be a manual save from the UI or a programmatic save.

Recommended configuration

There are many customization possibilities to improve the performance of the JobConfigHistory Plugin that are going to impact positively in the overall instance performance.

The configuration can be edited at Manage Jenkins -> Configure System -> Job Config History:

Use different history directory than default - Setting this option to a new location is good if you would like to store the job configuration history in another location other than $JENKINS_HOME/config-history (like another mount or another drive). We strongly encourage users to set this to another mount/drive as the job config history plugin will increase the number of inodes for the JENKINS_HOME directory.
Max number of history entries to keep - We recommend keeping this number to a minimum (about 1000). If left blank then all entries will be kept.
Max number of days to keep history entries - We recommend the max number of days to be 30 days.
Max number of history entries to show per page - (For Job Config History version 2.18 or later) We recommend keeping this number to a minimum (about 20). This control the number of history records being loaded when browsing the config history of a job.
System configuration exclude file pattern (default: queue\.xml|nodeMonitors\.xml|UpdateCenter\.xml|global-build-stats) - If there is configuration in the System configuration page which is altered too often or if altering it does not impact users, then those options can be excluded from being added to the exclude file pattern. Please, keep the default configuration, adding more patterns if required. For example, queue\.xml|nodeMonitors\.xml|UpdateCenter\.xml|global-build-stats|OperationsCenterCredentialsProvider|LockableResourcesManager\.xml|MilestoneStep\.xml
Do not save duplicate history - We recommend disabling this option. This option removes duplicate entries or entries where nothing changes but is also the cause of performance issues.
Save Maven module configuration changes - We recommend disabling this option. When a maven project completes the job configuration is saved, which causes an increase in the amount of maven module configuration changes.
Show build badges - Set to Never in order to not overload the history widget.
Exclude users - if you want to exclude changes by a specific user. For example, excluding SYSTEM in a CJP operations center - CJP client controller configuration.