SharePoint 2013 search is very powerful, however if you have limited server resources, it can easily get the better of your environment. \u00a0I\u2019ve seen a small SharePoint 2013 environment go unstable, with w3p processes crashing, ULS logs filling with low RAM errors, and search index going into \u201cDegraded\u201d mode during a crawl, and end-user search attempts returning correlation errors, and even sites and Central Admin returning 500 errors; all for wont of a few more GB of RAM. \u00a0An IIS Reset gets the server responsive again, and an index reset will get SharePoint crawling again, but outside of tossing in precious RAM chips, what\u2019s a caring administrator to do? \u00a0Let\u2019s first see how to determine whether your search index is degraded:<\/p>\n
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchStatus\r\n \r\nName State Description\r\n---- ----- -----------\r\nIndexComponent1 Degraded\r\nCell:IndexComponent1-SPb5b3474c2cdcI.0.0 Degraded\r\nPartition:0 Degraded\r\nAdminComponent1 Active\r\nQueryProcessingComponent1 Active\r\nContentProcessingComponent1 Active\r\nAnalyticsProcessingComponent1 Active\r\nCrawlComponent0 Active\r\n<\/pre>\nIn the example above, note the Index component is degraded. In Central Admin, simply do an Index Reset to get things back on foot, and restart the World Web Publishing to kick-start IIS and its app pools. In the command below, we\u2019ll lower the priority of Search, so it doesn\u2019t blow up our underresourced farm:<\/p>\n
set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced\r\n<\/pre>\nNext, let\u2019s limit the RAM utilized by the NodeRunners; these are the processes that handle search crawling. You can find this on C: or perhaps a different drive letter on your system:<\/p>\n
C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office Servers15.0SearchRuntime1.0<\/p>\n
Open text file (notepad is fine, especially if your farm is wheezing from being RAM challenged, here\u2019 the XML file: file noderunner.exe.CONFIG
\nChange value from 0 to 180. Note I would not run with less than 180MB per nodeRunner, as I\u2019ve seen search components fail to start as a result.<\/p>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\nTry another crawl, with a more RAM stable experience.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how to tell where your index is located on disk:<\/p>\n
$ssi = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance\r\n$ssi.Components\r\n<\/pre>\nHere\u2019s how to get the topology and the Index component:<\/p>\n
$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication\r\n$active = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchTopology -SearchApplication $ssa -Active\r\n$iComponent = $active | Get-SPEnterpriseSearchComponent IndexComponent1<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Running SharePoint 2013 search with limited RAM SharePoint 2013 search is very powerful, however if you have limited server resources, it can easily get the better of your environment. \u00a0I\u2019ve seen a small SharePoint 2013 environment go unstable, with w3p processes crashing, ULS logs filling with low RAM errors, and search index going into \u201cDegraded\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-search","category-sharepoint-information-architecture-services"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1402"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1423,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1402\/revisions\/1423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poiseddevelopers.com\/reality-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}