Step 2 in Optimize Sharepoint Performance: Isolate Search Indexing

Introduction

Microsoft SharePoint is the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. Its adoption rate has been exponential with millions of documents being stored daily. With its growth critical documents and procedures are now being stored in SharePoint. It is fundamental that SharePoint maintains its healthy status, and application performance is a key component for a successful deployment and adoption of SharePoint.

Step 2: Isolate Search Indexing

A typical medium server farm consists of one or more web front end servers, a dedicated index or application server and a separate SQL database server. In this scenario, search traffic initiated by the index server must be processed by the same servers responsible for delivering end-user content. The crawl process can create a tremendous amount of network traffic as the Search service must make a number of HTTP requests for each page in the hierarchy. Failure to isolate this traffic can have a negative impact on performance as search requests conflict with user traffic competing for the same limited amount of physical bandwidth.

In order to prevent search and user traffic from conflicting with each other, an additional server may be added to the farm which is dedicated solely to servicing search queries (alternatively, in smaller environments, the index server may also serve this function). The farm administrator would then configure the Search service to perform crawls only against this dedicated server, thereby eliminating excessive load on the web front end servers during index operations and reducing the amount of potentially conflicting requests. Depending upon the scope and frequency of search crawls, this configuration can reduce traffic to the web front end servers by as much as 70% during index operations.