sunspot_rails not re-indexing model after save

Question

I have a model which deploys a delayed job that updates some of its attributes. The model is declared "searchable"...

searchable do
  text :content, :stored => true  
end

... which I thought would re-index after a save. On testing, this doesn't seem to be the case. If I run: rake sunspot:reindex, then everything works as expected. What could be causing this issue?

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem as you - when I was testing my search functionality sunspot would never issue a commit to solr. If I manually call Sunspot.commit everything works. I fiddled around with auto_commit_after_request, but this is true by default so it shouldn't make a different.

So after some more investigation I found that Sunspot won't issue a commit automatically unless the change is made in the context of a web request. If you're doing a change from a test or a background job you have to call Sunspot.commit manually.

Answer 2

As mentioned by Jason, you can call Sunspot.commit_if_dirty to issue a commit from your client.

From the server configuration side, another approach would be to set the autoCommit property in your solrconfig.xml to automatically issue commits when there have been changes made to your index. A maxTime of 60000 ms (one minute) should suffice for most sites.

Using autoCommit is probably the wiser choice in production applications, where a high volume of commits can easily impact your Solr server's performance. In fact, it's a good practice with Sunspot to disable its auto_commit_after_request option when your site starts getting a decent amount of updates.

Lastly, autoCommit has the advantage of being able to set it and forget it.

At Websolr, our default is to ignore client-issued commits in favor of autoCommit.

Answer 3

The index will only reflect changes after Sunspot.commit is called. This happens automatically when you run rake sunspot:reindex.

Sunspot's Rails plugin also has a auto_commit_after_request config option which will call Sunspot.commit_if_dirty after every request but this will not be triggered by your background processes.

Your best bet is to call Sunspot.commit_if_dirty after as the last thing in your delayed job.