Corey Roth [MVP]

If you have ever installed FAST Search, you know memory is a commodity.  When you are looking at an environment with Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and FAST installed on top of it, your virtual server is consuming a lot of memory.  I picked up this quick tip from FAST University that is recommended to release a little bit of memory.  It’s no silver bullet and you might not ever even notice a difference, but I thought I would share it any way.

By default, a FAST Search server has four Document Processor services running.  You don’t need four in your development environment, so the recommendation is to take this down to one.  You can verify how many you have first by tying the following at a command prompt.

nctrl status

Here you will see all of the FAST processes.  Notice that there are four Document Processor modules listed.

We only want one Document Processor, so we simply issue the command below to remove a document processor.

nctrl remove procserver

Issue it three times like you see below to remove three document processors.

When you check nctrl status again, you will see only one Document Processor listed now.

How much memory might you reclaim?  Well not a whole lot but every little bit helps.  I think it will help some on your CPU utilization too when you are indexing (although it may take longer with only one processor running).  Here is what my utilization looked like before and after.

Anyhow, give it a try on your own VM if you want to see if it helps.  Why is the nctrl command say procserver?  Document Processors were called Processor Servers in FAST ESB from my understanding.