Change the Indexer Performance setting (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

This article addresses considerations regarding the Indexer Performance setting and explains how to change the current setting. You use the Indexer Performance setting to specify a base level for indexing activity.

Note

You can use crawler impact rules to modify this base level for indexing activity. Crawler impact rules override the Indexer Performance setting. For more information, see Manage crawler impact (Office SharePoint Server 2007).

You can set the Indexer Performance setting to one of the following three values:

• Reduced

• Partly reduced

• Maximum

Reduced is the lowest setting, Partly reduced is a higher setting, and Maximum is the highest setting. The default setting is Reduced. These settings are explained in more detail in the following sections.

In this article:

• How the Indexer Performance setting affects farm servers

• How the Indexer Performance setting affects the number of threads for crawling

• Determining the appropriate Indexer Performance setting

• To change the Indexer Performance setting

How the Indexer Performance setting affects farm servers

Decreasing the Indexer Performance setting curtails the speed at which items are indexed, which can cause search results to become outdated more quickly. Increasing the Indexer Performance setting can affect performance of servers in the farm in various ways:

• Index server

  Indexing can place considerable demands on index server resources such as the disk, processors, and memory. An index server must have sufficient hardware to accommodate the amount of indexing required by your organization. For more information, see:

  • Determine hardware and software requirements (Office SharePoint Server)

  • Estimate performance and capacity requirements (Office SharePoint Server)

• Database server

  The index server writes metadata that it collects from crawled documents into tables on the database server. When Indexer Performance is set to Maximum, the index server can generate data at a rate that overloads the database server. This can affect the performance of other applications that are using the same database server. It can also affect the performance of other shared services that are running under the shared services provider (SSP), such as Excel Calculation Services.

• Web front-end servers

  To crawl content on local SharePoint sites, the index server sends requests to Web front-end servers that host the content. Such requests consume resources on the Web front-end servers and can thus reduce the responsiveness of the SharePoint sites that are hosted on these servers for end users.

  Important

  Changing the Indexer Performance setting can also affect performance on crawled servers outside the farm.

How the Indexer Performance setting affects the number of threads for crawling

The Indexer Performance setting determines a default value for each of the following:

• Total threads available to the index server for crawling at any given time

• Maximum threads available to the index server at any given time for crawling any particular host

These values depend on the number of processors on the index server, as shown in the following table:

Indexer Performance setting	Total threads available for crawling	Maximum threads available for crawling any particular host
Reduced	Number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server
Partially reduced	4 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4
Maximum	16 times the number of processors on the index server	Number of processors on the index server plus 4

Note

• You can use crawler impact rules to modify the number of threads that the index server uses for crawling. This enables you to control more precisely the resource demands that you are placing on each crawled host. For more information, see Manage crawler impact (Office SharePoint Server 2007). For information about optimizing crawls, see the MSDN blog post Creating crawl schedules to minimize starvation (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123794).

• The maximum number of threads available for crawling is 64. This is the case regardless of your crawler impact rules or the number of processors on the index server.

Determining the appropriate Indexer Performance setting

Monitoring server performance during crawls can help you determine the appropriate setting for Indexer Performance. We recommend that you conduct your own testing to balance crawl speed, network latency, database load, and the load on crawled servers.

Consider the following suggestions regarding adjusting the Indexer Performance setting:

• If you are using the index server and database server only for searching (using the Office SharePoint Server Search service), you might want to set the Indexer Performance level to Maximum and note how this affects your database server performance. If the increase in database server CPU utilization exceeds 30 percent, we recommend changing the Indexer Performance level to Partly reduced.

• If the index server and database server are shared across multiple services, such as the Office SharePoint Server Search service and Excel Calculation Services, we recommend that you select the Partly reduced or Reduced setting for Indexer Performance.

To change the Indexer Performance setting

Use this procedure to view or change the Indexer Performance setting.

Note

Membership in the farm administrators group is the minimum required to complete this procedure.

Change the Indexer Performance setting

1. In Central Administration, on the Operations tab, in the Topology and Services section, click Services on server.

2. On the Services on Server page:

   1. If the server name that appears is not the appropriate index server, click Change Server, and then click the index server.

   2. In the Start services in the table below section, click Office SharePoint Server Search.

3. On the Configure Office SharePoint Server Search Service Settings page, in the Indexer Performance section, select one of the following:

   • Reduced

   • Partly reduced

   • Maximum

4. Click OK to save changes and return to the Services on Server page.