Unless you have very powerful hardware or virtual machines, anyone who has tried installing a full install of the new version of SharePoint 2013 Preview probably has run into problems with a bunch of noderunner.exe processes in your taskmanager just eating up practically all of your RAM and CPU making it very hard for you to do any development.  I found this post by an MCM named Mark Priem [1] that indicates that this is most probably due to a memory leak in this beta/preview version of SharePoint 2013.  I would assume this should be fixed in a cumulative update or hotfix quite soon.

Follow the steps below to limit the CPU and RAM impact on your system:

  1. In PowerShell, use the following to reduce the CPU impact the search service has on your test environment:
    • Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced
  2. Modify the C:Program FilesMicrosoft Office Servers15.0SearchRuntime1.0noderunner.exe.config so that it can only consume an X amount of RAM by changing the following value to any amount of RAM you like to contain the memory leak.
    • <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes=”0″ />


[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/mpriem/archive/2012/09/05/sharepoint-2013-preview-hungry-search-service.aspx


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