Summary

If a fatal exception (ie, OutOfMemoryError) occurs during the processing of an attachment (such as a large/corrupt PDF or DOCX), Confluence will not record the failure. When it restarts, it will re-try the indexing. This leads to a loop of failure, and the application becomes unusable.

Expected Result

Application fails catastrophically only once. The underlying failure can be investigated and fixed, but the application does not enter a loop of catastrophic failures as it tries to index an invalid file.

Actual Result

Applications enteres a loop of failures where it will become unavailable until Support (or other system administrator) removes the offending file.

Workaround

Identify the file being indexed, and remove it.