Elasticsearch experiencing fatal errors and restarting on "Problematic frame: # J org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentTermEnum.next()Z

Question

Elasticsearch has been failing quietly for some time now. Usually it just restarts but today it was unresponsive for an extended period of time. Eventually I learned that there were fatal error log files in the /tmp directory usually named something like hs_errpidxxx.log, all corresponding to the times of the elasticsearch restarts.

I looked into them and they all seem to either have this failure ...

# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007fad7c8a3523, pid=25995, tid=140381935929088
#
# JRE version: 6.0_24-b24
# Java VM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (20.0-b12 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
# Derivative: IcedTea6 1.11.4
# Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, package 6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.10.04.1
# Problematic frame:
# J  org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentTermEnum.next()Z
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please include
# instructions how to reproduce the bug and visit:
#   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openjdk-6/

or this one ... which is supposed to be fixed in Lucene 3.5 (see the answer in it) but I'm running 0.19.2 which is using Lucene 3.5 and it is still erroring out.

Can anyone tell me what is going on here? I'm running Elasticsearch 0.19.2 and using mmapfs as the store type.

Answer 1

Elasticsearch has known issues with this old version of java. Try upgrading to the latest version of Java 6 or 7.