In a recent project, ADCI Solutions shared an insightful experience that sheds light on the challenges faced in Drupal cloud hosting. This project centered around a client whose website specializes in selling equipment for biological labs. The choice for the website's deployment was Drupal, hosted on the Platform.sh cloud hosting service. This hosting service offers flexibility, allowing the connection of various services through registration in the configuration file.

The project primarily involved the creation of new equipment categories and search filters for the website. These additions were critical to enhancing user experience by enabling better search functionality. The search index had to be updated to make these changes come to life and effectively influence search results. The search index in Drupal is crucial for searching and sorting information accurately. However, a straightforward task soon became an unexpected and complex challenge.

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The obstacle emerged during the indexing process. The Solr search engine server consistently crashed and rebooted every time there was an attempt to index the site's content in all six supported languages. Oddly, this issue was isolated to the development and staging servers, which were designated as demo servers for the project. In stark contrast, the production server remained unaffected, perplexing the project team.

After an extensive investigation spanning approximately 20 hours, the project team pinpointed the issue. The root cause was identified as a limitation imposed by Platform.sh on demo environments. When the team reached out to Platform.sh tech support for assistance, they received a succinct yet enlightening response: 

"Your query is too large, so it cannot be stored in memory."

In response to this revelation, the team adopted a strategic approach. They systematically removed fields from the search index to reduce the query's size. The breakthrough came when they decided to remove the field responsible for tracking content language, which proved to be the key to resolving the issue. Notably, this solution not only proved to be effective but also incredibly efficient.

As a result of their perseverance and strategic problem-solving, the project team succeeded in overcoming the hurdle. The client approved the changes and gave the green light to deploy it to the production server. 

What's particularly striking about this case is the stark contrast in the time required to understand the problem versus the time it took to implement the solution—20 hours to understand and just 10 minutes to fix.

This case study serves as a reminder that within the realm of Drupal cloud hosting, even the most complex challenges may have simple solutions. 

Source of Information: Cloud hosting limitations you didn't know about | ADCI Solutions