Error Creating Search Topology in SharePoint 2013

Ajay Iyer SharePoint, , , ,

Microsoft replaced their legacy search engine from SharePoint 2007 & 2010 with the FAST search engine in 2013. With that, the only way to create/modify a search topology is using PowerShell.

Now there are several scripts out there that help you create a Search Service App and topologies. However, very often, we all run in to an issue with the process of creating a topology.

“The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component.”

This error is way too common across SharePoint farms in various organizations. And while there are several reasons that cause the error, one of them is that by default, the Search Service Application sets the performance level to “Maximum”.

Performance Levels:

  • Maximum (default): Total no. of threads created = 4 x no. of processors, but they never exceed more than 16 threads (High Priority) per server.
  • Partly Reduced: Total no. of threads created = 4 x no. of processors, but they never exceed more than 16 threads per server.
  • Reduced: Total no. of threads created = no. of processors.

There’s an excellent blog on technet as well that explains search performance levels.

How to fix the issue?:

  1. Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel “PartlyReduced” or Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel “Reduced”
  2. Restart the search service on all the servers in the topology, or if possible, reboot them all.
  3. Re-run scripts to create topology.
  4. Voila! Search Topology successfully created.
  5. Upload a bunch of documents to one of your sites and run a full crawl.
  6. Full crawl should now pick up those documents and store them in the search index.

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