Any ideas why Thinking Sphinx Rake tasks are not running?

Question

I\'m finding that Thinking Sphinx sometimes errors out when I try to run its Rake tasks. Sometimes the tasks work fine, and sometimes I get errors like the one below.

I\

Answer 1

I guess after deploy by capistrano you didn't run rake thinking_sphinx:configure
it would generate sphinx config file in config/production.sphinx.conf

try add pidfile to config/sphinx.yml

production:
  ...
  pid_file: "/tmp/searchd.pid"

it will make sure to find pid of searchd to kill

and added following code to config/deploy.rb

namespace :my_tasks do
  task :generate_sphinx_config, :roles => [:web] do
    run "cd #{latest_release} && RAILS_ENV=#{rails_env} bundle exec rake thinking_sphinx:configure"
  end
end

....

after :deploy, "my_tasks:generate_sphinx_config"

to generate sphinx config file in each release folder

Answer 2

I believe this error is caused when you have a search daemon already running.

Try

ps | grep searchd

if that gives you something like this...

73470 ttys002    0:00.03 searchd --pidfile --config /Users/dwickwire/Projects/production/config/development.sphinx.conf
81907 ttys002    0:00.00 grep searchd

then kill the searchd

sudo kill -9 process_id

process_id in my case would be 73470

Then try rake ts:rebuild again.

Answer 3

The Problem

This problem occurs if your searchd crashed or you killed it manually. On Windows it doesn't overwrite your searchd.<environment>.pid, so still the old PID is saved and ThinkingSphinx doesn't check the real running processes in your taskmanager. So all these commands (rake ts:restart, rake ts:rebuild, ...) won't work, rake will always abort and you get the error rake aborted, ... searchd already running

The solution

Delete your path-to/your-app/log/searchd.<environment>.pid.

<environment> may be development or production, depending on your current stage.

Hope this answer will help the googler's.

Answer 4

I tried command 'ps | grep searchd' to get process ID, but I didn't get it. Then I tried command 'pgrep searchd', it gives me process ID. I killed that process and ran command 'rake ts:rebuild'. It worked.

I blogged about the entire experience here (disclaimer: I'm the author).

Answer 5

In thinking_sphinx 1.4.4 there is a 5 second timeout on rake ts:stop

If rake ts:stop takes close to or longer than 5 seconds, ruby will throw an exception.

I'm using the thinking_sphinx 1.3.18 in the meantime. (there is no timeout on 1.3.18).

Also I have submitted a patch to the github repository and the timeout will be configurable with a sphinx.yml configuration variable stop_timeout.

NOTE: rake ts:rebuild == rake ts:stop; rake ts:index; rake ts:start