UNKNOWN_SEARCH_FAILURE exceptions

System

Just an FYI - we found a bug in Search that throws UNKNOWN_SEARCH_FAILURE exceptions occasionally when we run our cron script that kicks off our expiration process. The expiration process runs queries across 5 branches concurrently, every 5 minutes. This worked fine in 6.7.2, but now in 7.2.1, it's throwing these exceptions into the log quite often, but not all the time. After we got IW Support to talk to engineering about this exception, they came back with this:

I got an update last night from engineering that it is a defect in the code and will need a fix.


After further prodding for more detail, they came back with this:

The patch is only for the search/index server.
The workaround is not to run concurrent queries.
The root cause is one of the library we use is not thread safe.


I won't comment on the irony that a major Search company can't run concurrent queries. Anyway, They sent us a patch, which we will test out. I will update this thread with the results of our testing.

We are running 7.2.1 on RHEL 5.3