Does Jenkins still hold all job history in RAM?

[Christopher Shanahan]

So, I've been tasked, at work, with creating a Staging platform for our automated testing. The reasoning being that because our test platform is so closely tied to our build system, we want to avoid, at all costs, a Build not making it to Test because a Tester wrote a bad test.

I created such a system and am now tasked with making sure it can hold 18 months worth of build history.
In speaking with our Developer in charge of maintaining Jenkins he informed me that build history is held in active memory for Jenkins (atleast last he heard, which is claimed to be a year ago).

In doing some research myself I ran across this forum thread:
http://jenkins-ci.361315.n4.nabble.com/jenkins-consumes-lot-of-memory-td4662793.html
Which seems to indicate the issue was fixed before my Dev knew about it in the first place.

So I'm tossing the question out to you guys (via an email he gave me).
Does Jenkins still hold every Job history in RAM? Was this issue fixed like stated in the above Forum? Did the issue crop back up since then, and if so was it fixed, or is it being worked on currently?
I'm estimating anywhere around 2,000 to 3,000 saved Job histories once 18 months has been reached, so I want to either know I'm in the clear, or go back to my boss with "it's not feasible to accomplish that".


The Jenkins version we're currently running is 1.580.1 for frame of reference. 

[Daniel Beck]

On 22.01.2016, at 17:44, Christopher Shanahan <darkboy....@gmail.com> wrote:

> So I'm tossing the question out to you guys (via an email he gave me).
> Does Jenkins still hold every Job history in RAM? Was this issue fixed like stated in the above Forum? Did the issue crop back up since then, and if so was it fixed, or is it being worked on currently?
> I'm estimating anywhere around 2,000 to 3,000 saved Job histories once 18 months has been reached, so I want to either know I'm in the clear, or go back to my boss with "it's not feasible to accomplish that".

Jenkins discards loaded job data from memory as needed. Build data is only retained to speed things up.

Of course, once you go below a certain threshold, Jenkins will keep loading builds from disk then immediately discard them to make space for other builds being loaded, so you still need _some_ memory, and having more of it makes use of Jenkins faster, but it's not like it will fail hard if you're no longer able to store all builds in RAM at the same time.