mssearch.exe has high CPU usage

Hello-
Normally our mssearch.exe CPU is less than 5% even at peak times, and
falls to 0 at night. But for the last few days mssearch.exe CPU usage
remains close to 25% even when all the catalogs are idle and search
queries are very infrequent.
This happened a few months ago, and was fixed only by restarting
mssearch.exe. This time I'd like to discover what is causing the
problem. How can I figure out what mssearch.exe is doing?
SQL Server 2000 sp4 on Windows 2003 Server sp1, 4-processor, in an
active-active cluster, 3.5GB memory. 6 tables all with "Update Index in
background" option, each in their own catalog. The largest is 417MB
from 350k rows, the rest are much smaller.
Thanks for your help!
-Steve
www.vin.com
You can trace any SQL related activities of the MS Search service by running
SQL Profiler.
Perhaps - provided you're using task manager - what you see is the MS Search
service indexing your file system.
ML
http://milambda.blogspot.com/
|||Those are good suggestions, so thanks, but nothing was showing up on
profiler or perfmon that I could see, and nothing in the regular
filesystem was being indexed.
Here's how I resolved this, and it turns out that another issue I'd
been having was related to this one. There was a sql process (a
normally quick FT query) that was hanging for a couple of days and was
not responding to the KILL request. In the wee hours I restarted
mssearch.exe, the CPU dropped down to it's typical nearly nothing, and
the unkillable process finally dies. So I suppose mssearch was running
rampant and had locked up a sql process. Glad that's over but wish I
knew what caused mssearch to bork.
Cheers,
Steve
ML wrote:
> You can trace any SQL related activities of the MS Search service by running
> SQL Profiler.
> Perhaps - provided you're using task manager - what you see is the MS Search
> service indexing your file system.