Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Catalog: AnchorProject. A master merge was started due to an external request.

Today I was getting this warning in my server event log:
event id 4164 and 4103
Catalog: AnchorProject. A master merge was started due to an external request.

Since it was flodding my event viewer I didnt even see the other issues there... but one of the servers CPU was in max usage all the time (100%, but since we had 2 CPU task manager shows 50% total usage)...

Well, as I was digging up more info here is what I came up with and how I solved this issue:

1: I was getting an error on a certain page from within a site ( a custom list view ) that referenced the wrong master page - /_layouts/application.master. Since the celler page was in the list and not in the /_layouts/ folder this was blocked by ASP.NET
2: The caller user was my search user, lucky it is a unique user so I could be sure it was invoked by the indexer

So, after I fixed / deleted these 2 pages - the indexer stopped trying to index them, and 30 seconds after that the errors were gone and CPU back to normal...

Hope this helps you guys too, I will update if I get more info on this.

4 comments:

Jeff said...

How did you find these errant pages, exactly? Were they listed in search errors?

Anonymous said...

I am getting LOTS of those events in my event log, but my CPU is not getting hammered, and I don't know of any pages with errors like you have.

Did you just find the pages by accident or some other way?

Shai Petel said...

Hi Jeff and Rob,

I actually looked at the event viewer and got these errors.

At first I didnt see they were pointing to a specific page since the error description was very long, but when I took a longer look and bothered to scroll down all the way to the end for each error (I had LOTS) I saw some of them were pointing out a specific page.

Please update me if you have other issues with the same simptom so I could update my blog.

Thanks,

Anonymous said...

I'm having exactly this problem bu the descriptions in the event log dont have any pages listed. Am I missing something?