RhodeCode CE/EE

When attempting to request a rhodecode-index an Internal server error is reported. There is no exception logged in the Exceptions Tracker but in the community-1.log

2019-02-20 05:45:37.976 [10647] ERROR [rhodecode.api] Unhandled exception occurred on api call: <function get_repos at 0x7fef6f506c08>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/rhodecode/store/vn3vc3y4l7a19yriazpwpmnas8iijqcw-python2.7-rhodecode-enterprise-ce-4.15.1/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rhodecode/api/__init__.py", line 290, in request_view
    return jsonrpc_response(request, ret_value)
  File "/opt/rhodecode/store/vn3vc3y4l7a19yriazpwpmnas8iijqcw-python2.7-rhodecode-enterprise-ce-4.15.1/lib/python2.7/site-packages/rhodecode/api/__init__.py", line 114, in jsonrpc_response
    raw_body = render(DEFAULT_RENDERER, ret_value, request=request)
...
  File "/opt/rhodecode/store/9xq7fihpsz8cgkwyx6savnarbhsjhqz5-python2.7-simplejson-3.11.1/lib/python2.7/site-packages/simplejson/encoder.py", line 602, in _iterencode_dict
    yield _encoder(value)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: invalid continuation byte

adding a "* = 1" to the EXCLUDE section of the search_mapping.ini and only including one repo in the INCLUDE section but the same behavior.