Working on the Search

[Scott Greczkowski]

I came into work early this morning... and I have time so I am working on our Search Engine to keep it from crashing a few times a day.

At the moment I have reverted us back to the default Xenforo search, which is slower and does not have as many features. As I type this the search index is being built in the database. This will take about a half hour or so.

I will be uninstalling the ElasticSearch program from the server, and updating it to a later version. Once that it is installed, I will switch back to the enhanced search which will require another build of the search index.

I will update this post when it is done.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok Elasticsearch 7.17.24 has been removed, and ElasticSearch 8.15.3 has been installed.

The search index is now rebuilding again.

This should hopefully take care of the search crashing issue.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Well this morning at 8:27 am the search engine crashed. But this time I got an error this time... Out of Memory Error.

So I researched thing and to find out the default ElasticSearch setup has no memory limits set.

Our server had 64 gig of ram, and without ElasticSearch running we have over 42 gig of free ram. With ElasticSearch running we had around 8 gig of free memory. However it appears when its doing its maintenance it uses more ram,and thus we get an Out of Memory error.

Through researching more on this I I found that I can specify a memory limit that Java uses in ElasticSearch which should keep this from happening again. For now I specified the limit to be 16gig. Their recommended limits were 4 gig but their examples were for servers with a lot less memory then ours. Now with ElasticSearch running we have over 25 gig of free memory.

This should prevent the search engine from crashing, when it needs more memory it will cache from the drives. And since our drives are NVME drives there should be no speed issues.

While I am not happy it crashed, I am happy that at least this time it gave an error, so that I could research and (hopefully) find a solution.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok... 7 days later and things have been very stable with the search. No more search crashes and speed of site is great as well.

Next after the election I need to get us upgraded to Xenforo 2.3 and get all the plugins added too. We should see some speed increase when that is done too.