Search Crawler filling up drive, continuous crawls do nothing

Question

Our Central Admin server (also the crawler) is limited to 60 GB on the system drive (where SharePoint is installed).

Initially, a full crawl ran without issue and took minutes. We were happy with that and set it to continuous crawl, which seemed to work initially, picking up changes.

We migrated over about 30 GB of data and documents and continuous crawl couldn't keep up -- nothing new was added to the index for a few days.

I disabled the crawler, then started a full crawl and in an hour the hard drive filled up.

I moved the index, ULS, and usage logs to another disk drive, but this didn't have any effect on the gthrsvc folder on the c: drive.

Is there any way to move the gthrsvc folder? I've tried symlinks but SharePoint somehow figures that out, deletes the shortcut and recreates the folder. They removed the .TempPath property from the SearchServiceApplication object in 2013 and changing the registry keys does nothing -- they revert back almost immediately.

Answer 1

The only supported way to change the gthrsvc folder is to uninstall SP on this box and reinstall. When reinstalling, select another drive on the file locations tab. For more information, see this page: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kristopherloranger/archive/2014/02/07/sharepoint-2013-search-io-critical-component-locations.aspx

You can also think about adding another server to your farm and configure this new server to store the files on another drive upon installing of SP. Then after you add the server to the farm, move your search roles to this new server.

Answer 2

Stumped into the very same issue; adding a solution for future reference.

Way after the initial post a supported solution has been published here as a rewrite of a comment by Anthony Casillas (member of Search Team for Microsoft SharePoint) that is originally found here or on MSDN.

Retrieve the [GUID] of your search component, which you can find under the registry location "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15.0\Search\Components".

Create the new folder to be used for temp files; I used "D:\SearchTemp" in the example below.

Now open PowerShell (as administrator) on your SharePoint servers that use Search and run the following powershell commands:

$newtemppath = "D:\SearchTemp"
$gmpath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager"
$admincomppath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15.0\Search\Components\[GUID]"
$crawlcomppath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\15.0\Search\Components\[GUID]-crawl-0"
Set-ItemProperty -Path $gmpath -name DefaultApplicationsPath -Value $newtemppath
Set-ItemProperty -Path $admincomppath -name LocalStoragePath -Value $newtemppath
Set-ItemProperty -Path $crawlcomppath -name LocalStoragePath -Value $newtemppath
Restart-Service OSearch15

No restart of the server required, immediate effect.

Answer 3

Paolo's solution is working for SharePoint 2019 as well. Keep attention to folder Security unless you will get this error:

"The search application on server did not finish loading. View the event logs on the affected server for more information."

Solution is here

SharePoint 2019 version:

$newtemppath = "E:\SearchTemp"

$gmpath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\16.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager"

$admincomppath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\16.0\Search\Components\a5036454-e631-4ecd-a024-d216986aebb6"

$crawlcomppath = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\16.0\Search\Components\a5036454-e631-4ecd-a024-d216986aebb6-crawl-0"

Set-ItemProperty -Path $gmpath -name DefaultApplicationsPath -Value $newtemppath

Set-ItemProperty -Path $admincomppath -name LocalStoragePath -Value $newtemppath

Set-ItemProperty -Path $crawlcomppath -name LocalStoragePath -Value $newtemppath

Restart-Service OSearch16 # riavviare il server nel caso sia commentata questa riga