Timeout reading verity collection - CF8

Question

For a long time now I've been having a problem with using the verity search service bundled with ColdFusion 8. The issue is with timeout errors occurring when perfoming any operation on a collection. It's intermittent, and usually occurs after a few operations have been successfully performed.

For instance: If I'm adding records to a collection the first, say 15 records, will go through with no problems, but all subsequent records will timeout until the service is rebooted.

I'm on a shared server, Windows 2008, 64bit as far as I know. The error I receive is: "An error occurred while performing an operation in the Search Engine library. Error reading collection information.: com.verity.api.administration.ConfigurationException: java.io.IOException: Read timed out"

Having spoken to my hosting company, and after doing some research, it's been suggested that the number of collections on a server may cause this issue. I've reduced the amount of collections I use, and there are currently 39 collections on the server. As I'm on a shared server, I have no control over how many collections other customers use, however I've read that the limit is 128 collections, so I don't see why 39 should cause it to become unusable. The collections aren't big, there's maybe around 5,000 records between all of them.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Did you ever figure this out? I'm running into the same issue, except I'm on a dedicate server.

Answer 2

Verity seems to be quite vulnerable to corrupted indexes etc. Regular optimization will help a bit. I used to have all kinds of Verity-problems and errors like the above.

I implemented a cflock around all my read- and write-actions to the collection and no more errors have occured. (i guess it cant hurt in most situations, specially if you schedule large updates off-peak)

So maybe this can be a good additional solution for you too (or others ofcourse). Below short example of cflock around delete action.

<cflock name="SearchLock_#veritycollection#" type="exclusive" timeout="5">
        <cfindex 
            collection = "#veritycollection#"   
            action = "delete"   
            type = "file"
            key ="#toScheduleKey#">

            <cffile action="delete" 
            file="#toScheduleKey#">
    </cflock>