Sunspot Solr environment difficult - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm using the amazing sunspot gem(github.com/outoftime/sunspot) on a rails application but I'm having such a huge problem. I confess that I still don't know how to configure it correctly according to my environment, but everything is set up and running well on my local and stage servers.
Well, to sum up, my problem is that in production I have a model that is currently updated - every list that envolves this model, an attribute is incremented. And the main problem is that when I try to perform a complex search on this model(not contextual) the Connection Refused error appears to me but solr is running up and performing all other searches.
My solrconfig.xml is just like sunspot installation, I didn't change anything. Is the autoCommit section the solution for this, or is nothing to do with it ?
Sorry for the last update, I wasn't made a newbie mistake, the result of "ps aux | grep java" on the server:
ubuntu 4039 0.0 1.8 2278060 144084 ? Ssl Jan21 8:10 java -Djetty.port=8983 -Dsolr.data.dir=/home/ubuntu/mallguide/mallguide-rails/solr/data/production -Dsolr.solr.home=/home/ubuntu/mallguide/mallguide-rails/solr -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/tmp/logging.properties20120121-4039-co662r-0 -jar start.jar
ubuntu 23125 0.0 0.0 7628 1004 pts/1 S+ 10:47 0:00 grep --color=auto java
And my sunspot.yml file:
production:
solr:
hostname: localhost
port: 8983
log_level: WARNING
development:
solr:
hostname: localhost
port: 8982
log_level: INFO
test:
solr:
hostname: localhost
port: 8981
log_level: WARNING
auto_commit_after_request: false
Sorry for the poor english, hope that someone could help me.
I still don't know what to do to correct this problem, the point is that I have only one model that is updated(not the indexed fields on searchable) all the time and solr just fail for this model, and not for the others.
Any help ?

Answer 1

I fixed a similar error before. It may be related if your error symptoms match:
The kind of error messages I have encountered is like this:
Connection refused - connect(2)
with the backtrace:
/home/john/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:762:in `initialize'
...
rest-client (1.6.7) lib/restclient/net_http_ext.rb:51:in `request'
rsolr (1.0.8) lib/rsolr/connection.rb:15:in `execute'
Once I restarted sunspot solr server, errors will stop. During this time I can read indexes but not write to them.
Solution
The reason behind my error is that: I manually called RAILS_ENV=production rake sunspot:solr:start on the production server, and I also use capistrano to deploy so it has the current directory and the shared directory.
When I run that start command in the current directory, for some reason the index file is still referenced by the release path (e.g. release/2012xxxxxxxx/...). Capistrano will delete old releases, so every now and then solr will not be able to reference the folder if it gets deleted.
The solution is to explicitly specify the index file path with the symlinked current directory:
RAILS_ENV=production rake sunspot:solr:start --port=8983 --data-directory=#{current_path}/solr/data/#{rails_env} --pid-dir=#{current_path}/solr/pids/#{rails_env}"