Our SharePoint WFEs are spiking to 100% CPU when the incremental search crawls start. I have been digging into the issue but nothing seems to stand out. We also have two dedicated search servers configured to run all the search components. I am wondering why the WFEs are even running the crawl since we have dedicated search servers. I have a couple of questions:
- Can I move the crawling out of the WFEs to these dedicated search servers?
- Should I set one or both of the search servers as crawl targets?
- Do I need to enable the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service on the search servers in order to switch the target to the search servers? The dedicated search servers are not running the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application service so the web sites are not in IIS.
The SharePoint search service is not running on the WFEs either. I am wondering if we missed a step when we built the search servers to point the crawl to these servers.