SonarQube Developer or Enterprise on Large Codebasis

SonarQube Server / Community Build
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Dear Community,

we are currently using SonarQube Developer Edition 2025.X (not sure off the top of my head) with a limit of 1M LoC.

I am about to onboard a new application which has about 5M LoC.
Since I need a license upgrade for this to work, I was looking into the Enterprise Edition as it is recommended for projects larger than 1 million lines of code. On the other hand, I can also increase the LoC limit of my current version since most of the enterprise features are not really needed.

I currently do not have a number of developers working on the project at the same time, so I am unsure whether multi-threading/parallel scanning may be relevant (if yes, the decision is easy).

Do you have any recommendations or experiences regarding the different editions to use with large code bases? Do you have estimations regarding the runtime of a scan for a 5M project (and yes i know that it depends on further conditions like hardware)?

Thanks in advance and happy Coding

Edit: I’m using an on-premise installation.

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Hello! Upgrading to the Enterprise Edition doesn’t result in faster performance for a single project. If you don’t need features like AI CodeFix, Portfolios, or Security Reports, there’s no need to choose the Enterprise Edition just because you have a larger project.

It’s really too variable to estimate without a lot of details (language, for example). A good rule-of-thumb is that the analysis shouldn’t take longer than the build, if it’s a compiled language (Java, C#, C/C++)

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Hi Colin.

Thank you for your reply. Helped me a lot.

The decision now depends solely on whether parallelism will be required or not (waiting for access to their commit/build history).

I know that there tons of variables influencing an analysis. In my experience the scanner side usually takes longer than the actual build, but the server side is much faster.

Maybe helpful for others.
I use

  • on serverside 4 Cores and 8GB RAM
  • on the build agent 2 Cores and 16GB of memory

and a simple Spring Boot CRUD application (Java 21) with about 50k lines of code takes on average

  • ~90 seconds to build/compile
  • ~120 seconds to analyse clientside
  • ~15 seconds to analyse serverside

This topic may be closed.
Greetings and happy coding.

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