topic Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration in Alfresco Archive

Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

xarope — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:16:14 GMT

I'm setting up a proof-of-concept simple clustered configuration (single datastore and database, multiple alfresco instances) to try to convince management to switch from a legacy system.The documentation I can find in the wiki and on the forums and blogs, seem to talk about lucene a lot. However,

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

mrogers — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:43:23 GMT

Each instance of alfresco needs to be able to access a search subsystem, however that does not need to be a local solar instance.

You could have more than one instances of solr (for redundancy) behind a load-balance. You can then scale the alfresco nodes differently to the solar nodes. So you could take one solr node off line while maintaining it or add more solr nodes if the load requires it.

However for evaluation I suggest that you stick to a single box solution (solr and the repo and share on one box).

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

xarope — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:21:47 GMT

Thanks, appreciate the feedback. Seems to be working fine with an alfresco instance with it's own solr instance as well, and I'll try some horizontal scaling with an extra alfresco instance, using a pre-existing solr instance.

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

nubian — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:04:20 GMT

I hope I am posting this question in the correct place. I read the previous post and have been experimenting with using SOLR in a distributed fashion with Alfresco. Specifically, I have set up two Alfresco instances and changed the solr.xml file to point the data.dir to a NAS share. I also have changed alfresco-global properties to point the dir.root to a NAS share. In my solrcore files, I have set "enable.alfresco.tracking=true" and in the repository file I have set solr.host=localhost. When I add content on either instance, I see the repository and the indexes update on the NAS, however I receive a NativeFileLocking error from Solr in my log files and the searches seem inconsistent. When I change enable.alfresco.tracking=false in one of the instances, the locking messages disappear but I do not see any updates to the document properties on the instance. What is the recommended approach to configure a two node Alfresco cluster with shared MySQL, shared indexes and a shared contentstore?

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

mrogers — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:17:41 GMT

All the advice I have seen is to keep your indexes on a local fast disk.

I don't think you can't share your index files between two indexing servers (so two instances of solr accessing the same files) What you can have is one or more indexing server, each accessing its own index.

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

nubian — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:42:11 GMT

Thanks for your prompt response. So if I understand correctly, the best approach is to leave the indexes on each Alfresco instance, share the MySQL database and contentstore and set enable.alfresco.tracking=true on both instances. Each Solr instance will track the shared contentstore without creating locking contention on the updates\writes when content changes or is added?

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

tommorris — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:18:56 GMT

Yes, that's certainly one approach. I'm not sure that it's the best approach however.

Yes, sharing the file-content binaries (contentstore) is a frequently used approach, via NAS (e.g. NFS). Faster shared file-system configurations are also possible, but this one is common.

Yes, an Alfresco cluster sharing a single instance of the MySQL DB is also very common, although there are dozens of ways that you can cluster/failover the DB configuration (all of which are DB brand dependent).

Having a local SOLR configuration on each Alfresco server is not so common, although not unworkable. I normally see Alfresco clusters sharing a single instance of a SOLR server that lives on it's on box.

I prefer to at least host the SOLR service in a webapp in another tomcat to avoid sharing the same JVM heap space. The churn of short-lived objects can lead to an increased amount of garbage collection that can potentially stifle the performance of core Alfresco services.

Another advantage to hosting SOLR on a separate box (assuming you're not fully virtualised) is the opportunity to place the indexes on a very fast local disk (e.g. 15k rpm or SSD). This is because Lucene (which SOLR is based upon) is IO heavy, and increased speeds due to better hardware or access reduced contention (from other processes or VMs) can improve overall search performance.

Incidentally, it's not impossible to get reasonable performance on a well specified SAN for the indexes…

Sometimes you 'll also see more than one remote SOLR instance polling one of the Alfresco servers, which is also acceptable but since this setup is not a true SOLR cluster, it does double the SQL-query workload imposed by indexing operations. With a load-balancer in front of these two SOLR servers, I think there is a potential for inconsistent search results between two consecutively issued search results (which can probably be managed through a load-balancer configuration of somekind).

Tom
http://www.ixxus.com
Alfresco Platinum Partner

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

deepak1987 — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:18:26 GMT

Hi,

I have to configure SOLR Web App in an Alfresco Clustered Environment.

I have 2 Alfresco nodes in a cluster under Load Balancer.
Say,
Node1 with alfresco.host=node1.alfresco.com & alfresco.port=8080,
Node2 with alfresco.host=node2.alfresco.com & alfresco.port=8080

Main URL to access from client browser is: api.alfresco.com:80

SOLR Web App is deployed on a separate tomcat instance.
Say, IP address as solr1.alfresco.com

Now, each Alfresco Node has following properties common for SOLR.

/var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties file


### Solr indexing ###

index.subsystem.name=solr
dir.keystore=/var/alfsolr/keystore

solr.host=solr1.alfresco.com
solr.port=8080
solr.port.ssl=8443
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

And SOLR Web App is configured with following properties:
In
SOLR_HOME/workspace-SpacesStore/conf/solrcore.properties &
SOLR_HOME/archive-SpacesStore/conf/solrcore.properties files


### Alfresco HostName & Port ###
alfresco.host=api.alfresco.com      ## Main URL
alfresco.port=80
alfresco.port.ssl=8443‍‍‍‍‍

## OR ##


alfresco.host=node1.alfresco.com      ## or node2.alfresco.com. One of Alfresco Node URL in a cluster.
alfresco.port=8080
alfresco.port.ssl=8443
‍‍‍‍‍

If I specify alfresco.host=node1.alfresco.com & alfresco.port=8080, it works fine.

But, If I specify alfresco.host=api.alfresco.com & alfresco.port=80, it does not work and gives following Error:

I don't want to specify any of Alfresco Node's URL, because if that node goes down then, other nodes wont get search result.

java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
   at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
   at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:327)
   at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:193)
   at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:180)
   at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:384)
   at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:546)
   at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.connect(SSLSocketImpl.java:584)
   at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketImpl.<init>(SSLSocketImpl.java:426)
   at sun.security.ssl.SSLSocketFactoryImpl.createSocket(SSLSocketFactoryImpl.java:142)
   at org.alfresco.encryption.ssl.AuthSSLProtocolSocketFactory.createSocket(AuthSSLProtocolSocketFactory.java:168)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpConnection.open(HttpConnection.java:707)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager$HttpConnectionAdapter.open(MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager.java:1361)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector.executeWithRetry(HttpMethodDirector.java:387)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodDirector.executeMethod(HttpMethodDirector.java:171)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient.executeMethod(HttpClient.java:397)
   at org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpClient.executeMethod(HttpClient.java:323)
   at org.alfresco.httpclient.AbstractHttpClient.executeMethod(AbstractHttpClient.java:110)
   at org.alfresco.httpclient.AbstractHttpClient.sendRemoteRequest(AbstractHttpClient.java:86)
   at org.alfresco.httpclient.HttpClientFactory$HttpsClient.sendRequest(HttpClientFactory.java:307)
   at org.alfresco.solr.client.SOLRAPIClient.getModelsDiff(SOLRAPIClient.java:1007)
   at org.alfresco.solr.tracker.CoreTracker.trackModels(CoreTracker.java:1630)
   at org.alfresco.solr.tracker.CoreTracker.trackRepository(CoreTracker.java:1134)
   at org.alfresco.solr.tracker.CoreTracker.updateIndex(CoreTracker.java:491)
   at org.alfresco.solr.tracker.CoreTrackerJob.execute(CoreTrackerJob.java:45)
   at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:216)
   at org.quartz.simpl.SimpleThreadPool$WorkerThread.run(SimpleThreadPool.java:563)


Please help on this.

Re: Alfresco Community 4.0d with Solr in cluster configuration

reva_12 — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 20:00:29 GMT

I am trying similar thing. Did you get any luck trying that?
I would like to know how to make 2 alfrescos use the same remote SOLR.

Please help if you have any idea.
Thanks.