SearchStax Help Center


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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