About the project

The client's website sells equipment for biological labs. To deploy the site on Drupal, the Platform.sh cloud hosting service is used. You can connect various services to it by registering them in the config file.

Problem

We have created new equipment categories and search filters for the website. For them to turn on and affect the search results, we had to update the search index, which helps to search for and properly sort the information. However, the Solr search engine server was crashing and rebooting when trying to index the six languages the site supports. Search queries were crashing it only on the development and staging servers used as demo servers, while everything was working fine on the production server.

Solution

The reason was the limitation that Platform.sh sets for demo environments. The Platform.sh tech support responded to our requests with, “Your query is too large, so it cannot be stored in memory”. We started removing fields from the index to shorten the query. In the end, we removed the field that was responsible for the content language, and it made it work. This was enough for the client to approve the changes and bless the deployment to the production server.

It took us 20 hours to understand the problem. It took 10 minutes to fix it.