Updated: July 30th, 2021
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 …
Updated: July 30th, 2021
In the past few weeks I've been implementing advanced search at Plaxo, working quite closely with Solr enterprise search server. Today, I saw this relatively detailed comparison between Solr and its main competitor Sphinx (full credit goes to StackOverflow user mausch who had been using Solr for the past 2 years). For those still confused, Solr and Sphinx are similar to MySQL FULLTEXT search, or for those even more confused, think Google (yeah, this is a bit of a stretch, I know).