Solution #573 - Dovetail Seeker indexing service shuts down when disk space is low

When the amount of free space available is low the Dovetail Seeker indexing windows service may stop. This is likely to happen when the available free space falls below the current size of the search index.

When this happens the service will stop and you will see exceptions in the indexer’s logs that look like the following:

Lucene.Net.Index.MergePolicy+MergeException: Exception of type ‘Lucene.Net.Index.MergePolicy+MergeException’ was thrown
System.IO.IOException: There is not enough space on the disk.

Part of the search indexing process is to periodically merge index files. This is called search index optimization. This process improves search performance by reducing the number of files that need to be scanned when fulfilling search requests. During the optimization process your index size will temporarily grow to potentially double its current size.

For example: If you have a search index that is 5GB and your server’s disk has only 5GB free you could potentially run out of room on the disk and get out of space exceptions in the logs. It may be misleading when you check the free space on the disk and you see 5GB are free.