Harvester causes SOLR cloud to crash

[jbrown-xentity]

When a production CKAN catalog is implemented and indexed fully, the harvesters crash. Not sure yet why, need to investigate further.

Probably related to #3784.

Part of #1342

How to reproduce

1. Use DB prod backup to restore for catalog
2. Spin up and reindex catalog
3. Turn on harvesting

Expected behavior

Harvesting succeeds, solr lives on

Actual behavior

SOLR crashes/fails

Sketch

Need to isolate what is causing the problem, check the following use cases:

• Check if clean DB with number of harvest sources can harvest ok (it works great: https://catalog-fxia-datagov.app.cloud.gov/dataset/)
• Re-setup SOLR with clean DB and add failing test case: https://catalog.data.gov/harvest/about/ioos
• Monitor SOLR logs closely to evaluate what causes failure
• Analyze and triage...

[jbrown-xentity]

In our clean use case, https://catalog-fxia-datagov.app.cloud.gov/dataset/, 5 harvest sources worked ok (including largest DCAT-US source and several WAF's). When a 6th was added, https://catalog.data.gov/harvest/about/ioos, SOLR crashed. We confirmed the SOLR state is similar as before (no leader available). If so, we have our test case for reproducing and debugging. It harvested > 200 datasets (but probably < 5K) before SOLR crashed.

[nickumia-reisys]

The above findings leads me to want to test the following:

• Does the error occur with CKAN2.8/Solr 8 (Solrcloud Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.9/Solr 8 (Solrcloud Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.8/Solr 8 (Standalone Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.9/Solr 8 (Standalone Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.8/Solr 6 (Solrcloud Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.9/Solr 6 (Solrcloud Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.8/Solr 6 (Standalone Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No
• Does the error occur with CKAN2.9/Solr 6 (Standalone Mode)?
  • Yes
  • No

**Note: the CKAN 2.8/2.9 differentiator answers the question of it it's a weird encoding issue with the database dump taken from PY2/CKAN2.8 on FCS. If the same harvest source can be reliably harvested from scratch in a PY3/CKAN2.9 context, then the issue is that the data is not compatible between PY2/PY3.

Apparently, the error was not happening with CKAN/Solr 5 (Standalone Mode). We're not sure if this is a byproduct of,

• Standalone Solr vs. Solrcloud
• PY2 vs. PY3
• Solr 5 vs. Solr 6 vs. Solr 8

Without testing all of these cases in order (until the error no longer happens), we won't know what a good configuration is for our application and how to properly choose the right solution. Obviously, we can't go live with anything but Solr 8, but if the problem doesn't exist prior to Solr 8, then we have a bigger Solr problem than if our setup is the issue.