Fast ESP Error: no doc procs registered to process a batch with priority 0

Just wanted to take this error message off of the, “Hey, we’ve seen this before… now how did we resolve this..?” pile.  This is the full text of the error:

WARNING    Could not send batch to ESP content distributor, will retry automatically.
Reason given: process() failed: exception (no_resources) no doc procs registered to 
process a batch with priority 0

At first glance, it looks pretty clear that you just need to [re]start your document processor(s).  However, this won’t necessarily solve the problem.  Turns out that the a likely reason for this to pop up is a bad Document Processing Pipeline (DPP) Stage.  The docprocs fire up, hit the bad stage (e.g. python errors etc.) and don’t recover.

To debug your DPP Stage, take a look at the logs for the document processor(s).  They’re usually located in $FASTSEARCH/var/log/procserver and, in our experience, there’s probably an uncaught python exception lurking somewhere in there.