We are seeing a situation where the IndexWriter is using up the Java Heap space and only releases memory for garbage collection upon a commit. We are using the default RAMBufferSize of 16 mb. We are using Lucene 2.9.1. We are set at heap size of 512 mb.
We have a large number of documents that are run through Tika and then added to the index. The data from Tika is changed to a string, and then sent to Lucene. Heap dumps clearly show the data in the Lucene classes and not in Tika. Our intent is to only perform a commit once the entire indexing run is complete, but several hours into the process everything comes to a crawl. In using both JConsole and VisualVM we can see that the heap space is maxed out and garbage collection is not able to clean up any memory once we get into this state. It is our understanding that the IndexWriter should be only holding onto 16 mb of data before it flushes it, but what we are seeing is that while it is in fact writing data to disk when it hits the 16 mb limit, it is also holding onto some data in memory and not allowing garbage collection to take place, and this continues until garbage collection is unable to free up enough space to all things to move faster than a crawl. As a test we caused a commit to occur after each document is indexed and we see the total amount of memory reduced from nearly 100% of the Java Heap to around 70-75%. The profiling tools now show that the memory is cleaned up to some extent after each document. But of course this completely defeats the whole reason why we want to only commit at the end of the run for performance sake. Most of the data, as seen using Heap analasis, is held in Byte, Character, and Integer classes whos GC roots are tied back to the Writer Objects and threads. The instance counts, after running just 1,100 documents seems staggering Is there additional data that the IndexWriter hangs onto regardless of when it hits the RAMBufferSize limit? Why are we seeing the heap space all being used up? A side question to this is the fact that we always see a large amount of memory used by the IndexWriter even after our indexing has been completed and all commits have taken place (basically in an idle state). Why would this be? Is the only way to totally clean up the memory is to close the writer? Our index is also used for real time indexing so the IndexWriter is intended to remain open for the lifetime of the app. Any help in understanding why the IndexWriter is maxing out our heap space or what is expected from memory usage of the IndexWriter would be appreciated.
