what is basically NodeRunner is?

Everybody is talking about “How to fix performance issue caused by NodeRunner Process.

And I was thinking what is basically NodeRunner is?

Noderunner.exe (Microsoft SharePoint Search Component) is a component of SharePoint 2013 Search managed by the SharePoint Search Host Controller Service, and each Noderunner process hosts one of the following Search components;

·         Crawl

·         Content Processing

·         Index

·         Analytics

·         Query Processing

·         Search Administration

Noderunner.exe is the new executable of search service on SharePoint 2013. Each component having its own independent NodeRunner Process as you can see below:

The path of NodeRunner.exe is

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0

To fix the Memory leak issue, or to fix SharePoint performance issue with search service application we can follow these steps:

1-    Open the SharePoint PowerShell window and execute the below command

Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel Reduced.

2-    Open the config file at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config and change the value of memoryLimitMegabytes in noderunner node to some other value other than 0, say 100 or 200 which sets the cap limit for memory to be used.

<nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="250" />

By Defualt it is set to

<nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="0" /> here 0 means unlimited use of RAM

3-    Finally Restart the “SharePoint Search Host Controller” service