When a project is (re)built, the old search indexes in /var/indexes/<project> remain untouched. However, I just “fixed” a “broken” search in our application by simply removing the old indexes and having them be regenerated with the new build. Apparently the index became corrupted somewhere, which resulted in searches for a particular entity never returning any results. If the (useless) old search index would have been removed during the build process, the corruption would not have affected the new build.

Re-reading my last sententence I guess it might be useful for reproducibility of bugs if the index is not automatically truncated, but even in that case removing the indexes should at least be included in the “clean project” Ant target. That way the problems can easily be fixed if the corruption is due to for example incorrectly shutting down the server.

Submitted by Ot ten Thije on 31 March 2010 at 22:30