MarkLogic has encountered operational issues occasionally due to Anti-virus software scanning or locking its files. There have been instances of following errors being caused by such background services having access to MarkLogic files:

• XDMP-BACKDIRINUSE
  • "If neither of these solutions are sufficient to get past this error, you should look for external (non-MarkLogic) processes that might be holding a lock on database backup files, such as file backup or virus scan programs"
• SVC-MAPINI
  • "The most common cause of this issue is Anti-Virus software"
• Hung messages
  • "A file backup or a virus scan utility is running against the same disk where forest data is stored, overloading the I/O capabilities of the storage system"
• Windows file system errors such as SVC-FILREM & SVC-SEMPOST 
  • "To avoid file access conflicts, MarkLogic recommends that all MarkLogic data files be excluded from access by any background services"

MarkLogic assumes that it is the only ‘child’ on a given host. Anti-virus running in parallel, opening, locking journal files can wreak havoc and cause errors and data corruption. Due to the way that MarkLogic compresses and stores data, there is a good chance that at some point, a compressed string in something like a Forest file will match a Virus signature. This could result in the file being quarantined or, even worse, deleted, rendering your MarkLogic server unusable until you have restored (if you have a backup) the database. 

As a general rule, ONLY MarkLogic Server should be maintaining MarkLogic Server data files, typically /var/opt/MarkLogic/. If those directories MUST be scanned, then MarkLogic should be shutdown, or the forests be fully quiesced, to prevent issues. 

At the very least, exclude the data and config volumes and directories from the Anti-virus scan and ideally just disable the Anti-virus on MarkLogic hosts. This will prevent data from being removed inadvertently and reduce the I/O impact of regular scanning of the MarkLogic data files.

Also, note that we do not certify 3rd party security/compliance products. Generally, those softwares scan file system which will affect normal execution of MarkLogic. MarkLogic doesn't anticipate any other application software to have open file handle on its files.

Rather we provide recommendations on how to secure your MarkLogic Database. Given below is the link to our documentation for more details:

Infrastructure Hardening