SharePoint 2010 search crawl not working

Question

I have the following set up: 1 x Windows server 2008 R2 running SQL 1 x Windows server 2008 R2 running SharePoint 2010.

I have an issue with the search service application, the crawl appears to run for a never ending amount of time with 0 successes and 0 failures. Checking the Search Application Topology, I find that "Query Component 0" is "Not Responding".

I have tried the following: I have ensured that the index directory has the right permissions applied to it and the search service account is in the right groups to consume those permissions. I have re-created the search service application. I have restarted the search service manually.

I have trawled the net as much as possible to find a solution but as of yet have not come across something that has resolved this issue.

Any input will be very much appreciated

Answer 1

I know this is a long time after you posted this issue.

I had the same problem on 3 different brand new 2010 farms.

The crawl components would enter the "Not Responding" state and I'd have to reboot the servers.

I finally found a soultion that worked for us.

I did an index reset just after rebooting all servers.

Waited for them to all come online in the Search Administration Topology page.

Then I set the Crawler Impact Rules to retrieve only 8 documents per request for each of my web applications.

From then on, the crawls completed without fail.

As an experiment, I set the Impact rule to retrieve 1 document per request and it failed again. Than another with 16 documents which also failed.

Left un-entered, SharePoint computes a factor to use which may be flooding your network as well as locking down your servers.

Hope this helps others.

Good luck.