Re: beagle 0.2.16.3 occasionally loses all the file backend index

["D Bera" <dbera web gmail com>]

Hi,

> also noticed that a indexhelper process remained hung
> after a beagle-shutdown after the problem manifested
> itself today, so I had to kill it with SIGKILL
> (SIGTERM failed).

This is the immediate reason. For some reason, the indexhelper is
hanged or stuck in some loop or something in the middle of indexing.
If this is the case, beagle-shutdown, sigterm nothing would be kill
indexhelper. Sending sigkill would kill it, but the lucene index would
be left corrupted and the in the next run, beagle will purge all the
index.

There was a bug open in bugzilla exactly like this. However in that
case, the reason was a bug in the jpeg filter that was causing the
looping. I closed that bug since the jpeg bug was fixed prior to
0.2.16.3 and recommended upgrading to 0.2.16.3. Since you are running
0.2.16.3, there seems to some other problem somewhere else.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419648

If you have the logs and you want to figure out which file is causing
the problem, you can do this:

1) figure out the log file corresponding to the indexhelper that was
sigkilled. You can do this either by the timestamps if you remember,
or checking the last line of each indexhelper log file (if cleanly
shutdown, it would say "Index helper shut down cleanly" or checking
the beagled logfile which says "Purging ...Index" (the indexhelper log
file will be the one with the timestamp just before this beagled one).

2) In the indexhelper log file, check the last line of the form
"+file:///..." without a following "-file:///..." This would be the
file that indexhelper was stuck in when killed. The bugzilla bug was
once stuck in an archive too, so if the last "+" line says "created
XXX indexables..." then that could be the troublesome file too. Send
me/Joe that log file if you are not sure what is happening.

3) If you find the file, run beagle-extract-content on it. If it is an
archive, run with the argument "--show-children". It should
extract/index the archive and its content and not hang.

Or you can create a tarball of your beagle log directory and send it
to Joe (as he suggested) or attach it to the bugzilla bug.

- dBera

--
-----------------------------------------------------
Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE fan
Mandriva / Inspiron-1100 user