Hi All,
Today, I’ll talk about the Search issue I had few weeks ago.
This started on our SharePoint 2010 production Farm, with complain from users that weren’t able to find they newly added documents in the Search box.
At the beginning, I was asking them to wait until next working day, as the Incremental Crawl was running.
Then, days passed, and more and more users were complaining again and again.
Checking the server was showing that the Incremental Crawl were running, but really slowly.
Every days, I was receiving tickets about the usage of the CPU of my crawl server that was stuck at 100%.
When reading over the web, I discovered that the Crawl engine was using all the CPU while crawling.
This was driving me to the wrong path, and letting my server going deeper in the “glue”
I started to pause all the Content Sources, except one, but nothing seems to unstruck the index crawl.
So, I started to think about this problem, and facing Incremental Crawl of more than 300 hours, I decided to call Microsoft for having their support.
First of all, they confirmed that the Crawl process is using 100% of the available CPU, even if you add more and more CPU.
But the advantage, is that the Crawling Time is reduced.
Then, Microsoft asked me to run the Diagnostic Tool on my Service Farm, and they first pointed out that my servers were not fitting to the minimum hardware requirements: 2CPU + 40Gb HDD.
Then, I made a CPU and HDD upgrade: 4CPU + 270Gb HDD.
I started a Full Crawl of each Content Sources, then gradually, I’ve implemented the “Crawl Schedules” for each Content Sources.
Since last week, all the Content Sources are correctly crawling, and nobody is complaining.
So, this is the point to check when you have a search issue:
- Number of CPU
- Size of your log disk
- Crawl Schedule starting at different time
- Content DataBases are attached/detached, a Full Crawl must be performed (information given by Microsoft)
Voilà,
Thanks all folks
