SharePoint 2013 Crawl Tuning Part 3: Content Processing Component continued

Picking up from part 2, we continue looking at the Content Processing Component. There were some comments about the counters to look at and I wanted to provided a more simplified view that will be easier to understand. Instead of looking at all the flows, we'll look at just the component counter for Search Flow Statistics\Input Queue Full Time.

Baseline:

Looking only at the component counter, we can see it gets up to about 3,500. This is over the limit mentioned as guidance. But, that is just a rough guideline.

With 1 additional Content Processing Component from part 2:

Now we see a dramatic increase in  Search Flow Statistics\Input Queue Full Time, up to a combined 20,000. This is way over the guideline of 1,000. We shouldn't expect to gain anymore speed in our crawl by adding additional Content Processing Components at this time.

To demonstrate further that adding another Content Processing Component wont help. I modified the topology and added a third Content Processing Component. My crawl still takes the exact same time as with only two CPCs. You can also see that the total Search Flow Statistics\Input Queue Full Time doesn't change, we are pushing more content than the indexer can keep up with.

In part 4 we'll keep tuning to speed up the crawl.