As an update, I discovered the error I’m getting with Thinking Sphinx is:
ERROR: index 'refinery_products_product_core': sql_fetch_row: Out of sort memory, consider increasing server sort buffer size.
One suggestion from the Thinking Sphinx maintainer was to adjust the settings in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file, but I’m not sure how to access or update that file in the CircleCI realm.