SearchStax Help Center

The SearchStax Help Center Frequently Asked Questions page includes FAQs about SearchStax Managed Search, our hosted Apache Solr Cloud service.


Could not obtain overseer’s address

SearchStax Managed Search service administrators sometimes overload their systems by asking Solr to index too many records in a single batch, or too many batches in a short amount of time. CPU levels max out at 100% for extended periods. This can cause service outages as one replica after another goes into recovery mode for no visible reason.

When overloaded, Solr stores incoming /update requests in Zookeeper’s overseer queue. In extreme cases, Zookeeper can get into a state where the overseer queue is too full to process. At that time, we typically see:

  • Solr connection timeout messages.
  • Replicas in recovery.
  • Large numbers of indexing errors and Solr timeout errors.
  • Solr warnings saying “Could not obtain overseer’s address, skipping.”

You can check the state of the overseer queue using this Solr URL command:

<Solr HTTP endpoint>/admin/collections?action=OVERSEERSTATUS

If the queue is large and does not seem to be diminishing, please ask SearchStax support to manually clear the queue. This is likely to require a rolling restart to help Solr recover from the effects of overloading the indexing process.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.


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