Sometimes one has to make things work in the environment one is handed (e.g. virtualized servers, ALL storage resources resident on a SAN and accessed via NFS, read-only mounts on the deployment instances with only the production indexers having write access). While I agree that fast local index storage is best, with enough RAM allocated inside the Solr JVM to allow adequate caching and enough outside the JVM to allow adequate kernel disk buffering, the deleterious effects of network throughput and latency can be reduced, and there are public deployed Lucene- and Solr-based sites which operate as described above, yet perform acceptably.
To avoid the stale filehandle problem you need to have Solr create a new Lucene IndexReader and close the old one, after any update that deletes files, e.g. whenever the index is optimized. This is done in Solr by sending a <commit> message to the search server's update handler, as encapsulated in the bin/readercycle script. You can specify in solrconfig.xml that the indexing instance should trigger a script upon every commit or optimize, and that script could cause the search servers to readercycle. Though the Solr Wiki CollectionDistribution and OperationsTools pages are written from the standpoint of indexes being efficiently copied to each search server directly rather than automagically distributed via NFS, they should explain enough about the underlying scripts to get you started: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/CollectionDistribution http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrOperationsTools - J.J. At 11:53 AM -0700 9/13/07, Walter Underwood wrote: >The straightforward solution is to not put your indexes on NFS. It is >slow and it causes failures like this. > >I'm serious about that. I've seen several different search engines >(not just Solr/Lucene) get very slow and unreliable when the indexes >were on NFS. > >wunder > >On 9/13/07 10:59 AM, "Kasi Sankaralingam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Hi All, >> >> >> >> I have multiple SOLR instances in read only mode accessing index files >> on a NFS partition, I run the indexing/updating of indexing from another >> SOLR >> >> Instance. When I run a commit command on the search servers to warm up >> the searchers after update I get 'NFS stale handle' error message. >> >> The core exception is from Lucene index Reader class. Has anyone seen >> this before ?, what is the solution for this problem? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Kasi
