My first blog post. Thanks to Mindsharp for giving me a place to post my random thoughts, uh, I mean all things SharePoint and Microsoft Office related! I actually have some cool stuff for this post, so I will move on.
I was working with a medium sized portal the other day and all WSS site searches quit, completely. Yes, my first assumption was a Portal admin had turned off SQL Full Text Indexing in WSS Central Admin. I browse there, but to my dismay, it was checked.That would have been too easy. What happened next surprised me - even though the box was checked, I clicked OK and I got the churning SharePoint gears - and it didn't stop. I go check my SQL cluster and it's CPU was pegged at 100%! Even though it was already enabled, selecting OK here rebuilds the indexes from scratch! Don't you love SharePoint 'features'. It actually can come in handy if your Index becomes corrupted. There may be another way to rebuild the indexes, but I am not a DBA. One more thing about the indexes, they are usually stored on your SQL Server c: drive and can take a ton of space.
So, why was the SQL Server CPU at 100% anyway? I made the assumption that it would be the Search Service on the cluster (mssearch.exe), but I found a service, Mssdmn.exe tagging the CPU. This is actually the Office Document filtering daemon. I looked up the error on TechNet and found an existing issue, Q900390. The fix was released on Oct 7, 2005 and seemed to fix our issue. It does require SQL Server 2000 SP4 and unless you have a PSS account, you have to call Microsoft to get the fix.
Ben Curry