Updated: September 28th, 2009
The Problem
I am throwing up a quick post about a relatively cryptic error that Solr started throwing the other day here at Plaxo. After happily running for a few days, I suddenly started getting pages about failed Solr indexing.
Upon closer examination, I saw the following repeatedly in the log file:
catalina.2009-09-18.log:SEVERE: java.io.IOException: directory 'DATADIR/index' exists and is a directory, but cannot be listed: list() returned null
I tried to see if sending an OPTIMIZE command would help but the server returned the same response.
Digging Deeper
The reason was these errors was quite simple – Solr was running into the system level limit on allowed number of open files (ulimit). This limit can be seen…
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beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who currently works at 
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