issue2550839: Xapian, DatabaseLockError: Unable to get write lock on db/text-index: already locked I put in a retry loop that will attempt to get the lock. 10 tries with a delaythatvaries from .02 seconds to .64 seconds. Total delay over 10 cycles approx. 4.5 seconds. I can't figure out how to make pytest run two parallel processes to test this code. I did try running: ./run_tests.py -k Xapian test/test_indexer.py & ./run_tests.py -k Xapian test/test_indexer.py and confirmed that one of the processes seemed to hang on a test and then threw a lock failure error. So at least the code path is being exercised. If anybody knows how to correctly test this I would love to do a real test.