index creation times out with ProcessClusterEventTimeoutException

Question

I suddenly cannot create an index (neither explicitly nor by indexing something into an index which does not exist). Other operations are fine (indexing, searching). The error I get in security.log is:

[2015-02-10 15:48:46,303][DEBUG][action.admin.indices.create] [eu4] [yoptest2] failed to create
org.elasticsearch.cluster.metadata.ProcessClusterEventTimeoutException: failed to process cluster event (create-index [yoptest2], cause [auto(index api)]) within 1m
        at org.elasticsearch.cluster.service.InternalClusterService$2$1.run(InternalClusterService.java:263)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1145)
        at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:615)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

This is a cluster of three machines (health green) and I get the same timeout no matter which node I hit.

What can be the cause?

Answer 1

I got around the problem by rebooting all nodes. This is not a solution, I do not know the root cause of the problem but at least everything works again.