Hello,
I would like to be able to instantiate a RAMDirectory from a directory
that an IndexWriter in another process might currently be modifying.
Ideally, I would like to do this without any synchronizing or locking.
Kind-of like the way in which an IndexReader can open an index in a
directory, even if it's currently being modified by an IndexWriter.
However, simply calling:
RAMDirectory rd = new RAMDirectory("/path/to/index");
Will not work. It will periodically fail with a FileNotFoundException.
It's fairly obvious why this happens: Directory.copy() gets a list of
the files it needs to copy, and then copies them into the RAMDirectory
instance one-by-one. If, in the meantime, the IndexWriter deletes one of
these files, a FileNotFoundException occurs.
One thought that I had was that I would take advantage of the fact that
it's possible to open an IndexReader on the mutating directory, and then
use the "addIndexes()" method, as follows:
// 1. create RAMDirectory.
RAMDirectory ramDirectory = new RAMDirectory();
// 2. create an index in the RAMDirectory.
IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(ramDirectory, null/*analyzer*/,
true /*create*/) ;
// 3. open the (possibly mutating) source index.
IndexReader reader = IndexReader.open("/path/to/index");
// 4. copy the source index into the RAMDirectory index.
writer.addIndexes(new IndexReader [] {reader});
However ... there is a fairly unambiguous warning in
IndexWriter.addIndexes()'s documentation:
>> NOTE: the index in each Directory must not be changed (opened by a
writer) while this method is running. This method does not acquire a
write lock in each input Directory, so it is up to the caller to enforce
this.
I'm slightly confused by this warning though, as IndexReader's
documentation implies that it is OK to open an IndexReader in this fashion.
I'm wondering whether anyone knows the internals of
IndexWriter.addIndexes() well enough to know whether my proposed
solution will work reliably?
Or, indeed, whether there might be another way of instantiating a
RAMDirectory from a directory which might currently be being modified by
an IndexWriter?
Many thanks in advance,
Kieran Topping
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