YaCy Crashes

I should officially call this page /about-yacy but (SEO) I know when I wanted to know more about YaCy it was because it kept crashing. So you’ve found yourself here for the same reason this page exists. I hope I can make it easier for a beginner, given that I am probably more ordinary, especially compared to the developers.

Since you may be like me, and understand that YaCy is the only pure, incorruptible privacy solution for search, we are going to tolerate the gap.

It can be frustrating getting to know YaCy. If you are new to YaCy, dont give up. It’s quite the unique, might I say, ideal search engine concept. Yes, P2P for search has some hard limitations – as in they are not negotiable. More on that another time. But so far there is nothing close to YaCy out there.

Unfortunately YaCy just has a gap and a long learning curve for the beginner. This should help. What you need to know:

1. YaCy is more of an enterprise development (it seems to me). That means it seems to be designed to use a lot of resources as if you are a corporation that has a large IT budget and you can allocate a huge server to just running YaCy. Let me say that again – it won’t run well on a small computer! So try it on your laptop if you like, just to get a feel, but when it crashes, migrate to something with some muscle before going away mad (or complaining).
2. Because YaCy was developed NOT for individual public users, there is no on-ramp. Neither the Documentation nor the Forum are beginner-friendly (the people are friendly) Its just the lack of guidance for the real NOOB.
3. YaCy has bugs. Determining what is a bug and what is user-error put the beginner in a tough spot. What to do? Who to ask? What to ask? The forums are full of lonely beginner questions that never get answered (understandably).
4. I speak some German, but the existing Documents are mostly non-English translations directly from German to English, which almost require that one can speak German to fill the gaps. That means for non-German speakers, or those of us ordinary folks that are not JAVA developers, learning to operate a YaCy instance from the docs is a challenge. The Forums have some bits of intel that help – after you are over the NOOB-curve.

Once installed, you will find everything works fine. You crawl a couple sites. Do some searches…and YaCy crashes. Now you have questions that are not easy to find answers for.

This is the NOOB zone – the no-mans land that is the most painful part of the YaCy learning curve.

You need two things at this stage:

1. how to configure YaCy to operate optimally on your machine (without crashing)
2. what to do when YaCy crashes. (and how to know when it has crashed)
3. Do not edit the index while the crawler/indexer is running. (just a notion that this causes crashes)