[ ...]I've read from various sources on the Internet that it is perfectly safe to simultaneously search a Lucene index that is being updated from another Thread, as long as all write access to the index is synchronized. But does this apply only to updating the index (i.e. deleting and adding documents), or to a complete re-indexing (i.e. create a new IndexWriter with the 'create' argument true and then re-add all the documents)?
[...]java.io.IOException: couldn't delete _a.f1 at org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory.create(FSDirectory.java:166)
This is running on Windows 2000.
On Windows one cannot delete a file while it is still open. So, no, on Windows one cannot remove an index entirely while an IndexReader or Searcher is still open on it, since it is simply impossible to remove all the files in the index.
We might attempt to patch this by keeping a list of such files and attempt to delete them later (as is done when updating an index). But this could cause problems, as a new index will eventually try to use these same file names again, and it would then conflict with the open IndexReader. This is not a problem when updating an existing index, since filenames (except for a few which are not kept open, like "segments") are never reused in the lifetime of an index. So, in order for such a fix to work we would need to switch to globally unique segment names, e.g., long random strings, rather than increasing integers.
In the meantime, the safe way to rebuild an index from scratch while other processes are reading it is simply to delete all of its documents, then start adding new ones.
Doug
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