Disabling the SharePoint Search Service

11 Mar 2015 | SharePoint | Windows

If left unchecked, the SharePoint search service to attempts to consume most of the available memory in a resource constrained development box. I usually disable it when I am not actively working with it.

This seems to be most effective way to completely disable the service. Although changing the password to an invalid one works as expected, it is important to replace the user account from a domain to a local user account as well. If not, the constant invalid login attempts could trigger your account lock out threshold policy in the domain.

So for convenience sake I created two batch files - one to disable the service and another to bring it back up.

Disable the Search Service

The commands used to disable the search service:

net user searchDummy Sup3rSecr3tPwd /add /passwordchg:no /expires:never
net stop SPSearchHostController
net stop OSearch15
sc config "SPSearchHostController" obj= ".\searchDummy" password= "WrongPwd"
sc config "OSearch15" obj= ".\searchDummy" password= "WrongPwd"
taskkill /im:noderunner.exe /f

Notice that:

  • The first command creates the dummy user in the local machine - this will substitute the domain service account.
  • The password is intentionally set to an incorrect one when assigned to the service.
  • The last command is to force terminate any instances of noderunner.exe and release some memory.

Enable the Search Service

The commands used to start the service up again:

sc config "SPSearchHostController" obj= "domain\searchservice" password= "CorrectPwd"
sc config "OSearch15" obj= "domain\searchservice" password= "CorrectPwd"
net start OSearch15
net start SPSearchHostController

References

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