Problems with spellchecker

[Simon Wistow <si...@thegestalt.org>]

The spellchecker in my 1.4 install started behaving increasingly 
erratically andsuggestions would only be returned some of the time with 
the same query. 

I tried to force a rebuild using

spellcheck.build=yes 

The full request being

/select/?q=alexandr the great&
indent=on&
fl=title&
spellcheck=yes&
spellcheck.collate=yes&
spellcheck.count=3&
qt=dismax&
spellcheck.build=yes

and the request spun for a while and then returned 

HTTP Status 500 - this IndexReader is closed 
org.apache.lucene.store.AlreadyClosedException: this IndexReader is 
closed at 
org.apache.lucene.index.IndexReader.ensureOpen(IndexReader.java:209) at 
org.apache.lucene.index.DirectoryReader.docFreq(DirectoryReader.java:624) 
at 
org.apache.lucene.search.IndexSearcher.docFreq(IndexSearcher.java:147) 
at 
org.apache.lucene.search.spell.SpellChecker.exist(SpellChecker.java:315) 
at 
org.apache.lucene.search.spell.SpellChecker.indexDictionary(SpellChecker.java:339) 
at 
org.apache.lucene.search.spell.SpellChecker.indexDictionary(SpellChecker.java:362) 
at 
org.apache.solr.spelling.IndexBasedSpellChecker.build(IndexBasedSpellChecker.java:89) 
at 
org.apache.solr.handler.component.SpellCheckComponent.prepare(SpellCheckComponent.java:102) 
at 
org.apache.solr.handler.component.SearchHandler.handleRequestBody(SearchHandler.java:174) 
at 
[ .. snip .. ]

And the spellcheck directory now has a write.lock file.

I tried a couple more times then stopped tomcat, deleted the write.lock, 
restarted and tried again. Same error. So I stopped tomcat again, nuked 
the spellcheck directory, restarted tomcat and tried again. Same error. 
I tried one more time and got a "This file does not exists _f00.cfs" 
tried again and got the "Index Reader is closed" error again.

My source index is 58Gb.

Any ideas?

Simon