SharePoint 2019 Search stops crawling - MSSDMN.exe missing from crawl servers

Question

Hello,

I have SharePoint 2019 farm set up running good but notice that search crawl goes in to sleep mode usually at around 4 am. By sleep mode i mean it will show content sources as crawling but crawl reports will show no data after 4ish am and If I go to search administration page it shows "Recent Crawl Rate = 0.00 items per second". I also check the crawl logs, last successful/failed item was around the same time when it went in to sleep mode. So its confirm its not crawling but showing content sources as crawling.

One more thing I notice that mssdmn.exe process is missing from Task Manager, I checked other environments and regardless crawl is running or not this process exist.

Question is , any one has seen this behavior ? any solution or guide on why this process is missing and what can be done to prevent this from happening ?

If I reboot the crawl servers, every thing come back fine I can see mssdmn.exe in task manager and content sources are idle and will kick of at next schedule.

CPU usage goes up to 90% but Memory is not used more then 50%.

Any information or help on this will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi @Umr ,

According to my research, the reason for the problem is that when crawling, mssdmn.exe will run and take up a lot of CPU. Reboot the crawl servers can be done.

First, check whether your hardware meets the configuration of SharePoint server 2019.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/hardware-and-software-requirements-2019

All SharePoint servers are rebooted quarterly as a maintenance activity, and issues are properly scheduled for timing and number of crawls, to keep such issues from arising.

For more information, please refer to:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/plan-crawling-and-federation

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/search/best-practices-for-crawling

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.