SharePoint 2013 Preview – Hungry search service

Due to the many response I get: This post was written specifically for the Preview of SharePoint 2013
The memory leak is resolved in RTM. Please do not apply the memory settings in production!

 

Just today there was some discussion on our internal DLs about the noderunner.exe processes of the Enterprise Search service being very hungry for CPU and RAM.

It turns out that there is a memory leak and a lot of debug code involved [REMEMBER: We are still at beta here J].

Jose Vigenor from MS beta support pointed to two options to contain these processes:

  1. Use Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced to reduce the CPU impact the search service has on your test environment.
  2. Modify the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config so that it can only consume X amount of RAM.
    Change the value at <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="0" /> to any amount of RAM you like to contain the memory leak.

Good luck!