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Derek Bierhoff
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European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Find Performance Issue on SharePoint 2013
Nov 25th
Background
SharePoint 2013 has now as designed the architecture of FAST Search. This is one of the important reasons why more and more corporates are now switching to SharePoint 2013 and not to other collaboration platform’s.
It sound perfect to have a SharePoint Server 2013 with fast; but if you’re on a development environment with limited hardware resources, the chance exists that you’re Virtual Machine became too slow or even worst it will not respond anymore and the only way is reboot your server.
I have a SharePoint Farm installed on my laptop and only 2 Service Applications has been configured:
- Search Service Application
- Managed Metadata Service Application
Nobody is using or connected to the SharePoint Farm but the RAM has almost reached the Maximum
As you can see “Noderunner.exe” (Microsoft SharePoint Search Component) is itself consuming a lot of memory and the same Process is running multiple times. Noderunner.exe is the new executable of search service on SharePoint 2013. This process can’t turn it off because Search is one of essential service application in SharePoint 2013, and it is integrated in many features.
Find Problem
Let’s kill manually these services and see if my SharePoint site is still answering. Select your process and hit “End Process Tree”. This will kill the Process and all children that are attached to him.
As I’m on my Development machine I’m doing the same operation on all the Processes.
And Strike! Everything related to the Search (Content Search, Web Part …) is broken. I can browse to my Website but can’t execute anything related to the Search Service Application. As you can see this isn’t the best approach to gain performance.
Test
It’s really annoying because the Search Service Application shouldn’t not cause so much damage on our SharePoint Farm.
On SharePoint 2010 I knew we could configure the Search Service Performance Level with powerhsell.
Powershell Cmdlet:
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel “PartlyReduced”
Performance Level Explained:
- Reduced: Total number of threads = number of processors, Max Threads/host = number of processors
- PartlyReduced: Total number of threads = 4 times the number of processors , Max Threads/host = 16 times the number of processors
- Maximum: Total number of threads = 4 times the number of processors , Max Threads/host = 16 times the number of processors (threads are created at HIGH priority)
And in fact on SharePoint 2013 it’s the same scenario. After searching a while I found on TechNet this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608126.aspx who actually confirms my theory.
Open Powershell with a Domain Account who has Farm Administrator Rights and hit Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService and as imagined the PerformanceLevel is set up to Maximum.
To change this to reduced or partly reduced hit Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced and restart the SharePoint Search if your Virtual machine is still answering. After this manipulation your SharePoint Server will be able to breathe and you can continue to work.
Test: Not tested way
You can also say that you want to have the Maximum Performance Level and refuse to change it to reduced.
There is a Config file for NodeRunner.exe’s configuration file that can limit RAM usage of a single process to specific value in megabytes.
You can find it under :
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config.
The configuration setting is called memoryLimitMegabytes and the default value is 0 (I guess unlimited). You can hit the value you want, save the file and restart your Search Service.
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Oct 8th
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Europe SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Call WebService in SharePoint 2013, How to Use it?
Aug 21st
In SharePoint2013, you can use call web service action and loop. In this post, I will show you how to achieve this.
1. Create a List workflow called CallWebService
2. Create a variable called listurl
3. Create a dictionary variable called RequestHeaders and add the following key value pairs.
4. Call the web service with the HttpHeaders you just build in the previous step and store the response in the variable ResponseContent.
5. The ResponseContent variable is the Dynamic values (in SharePoint designer it will be called dictionary type) and it is new feature for SharePoint2013 workflow. We can use the following actions to count the number items in the variable.
6. You can use loop in SharePoint 2013 workflow and out each list title as shown below.

European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: SharePoint 2013 Content Databases and the AllUserData Table
Jul 19th
I believe that some of you never realize that something’s changed of the content database in SharePoint 2013. Is that correct? As you know, AllUserData table has changed. See this:
First of all, what’s happened to columns [nvarchar1], [nvarchar2] (skip a few) [nvarchar64]? How about [int1] to [int16]?
They’ve all been combined into a fragment of Xml, and stored in a single column [tp_ColumnSet].
Let’s zoom in and have a look at one of those Column Sets:
That’s interesting.
Wide List Issues
Firstly, this means “wide lists” are going to be potentially faster than under 2010. A “wide list” in SharePoint 2010 was one that had so many columns that it would cause an INSERT or UPDATE statement to affect more than 8000 bytes of row data.
To work around the problem, when SP2010 works out the column you’re about to add to a list could cause more than 8000 bytes to be written, it would instead create an additional row to hold the new columns. SharePoint used the [tp_RowOrdinal] column to number each of the rows accordingly for a wide list.
We expect SQL Server to start table locking the AllUserData table as the number of row locks approaches 5000. Wide list behaviour would potentially cause SQL Server to have locky behaviour at one-half as many rows (or one-third, or one-quarter – depending upon how many list columns and therefore SQL rows).
Now it’s all stored in one big column, that particular problem is going to go away.
However, the [tp_RowOrdinal] column still exists in the SharePoint 2013 content database, and I’m not sure why.
SharePoint 2013 Content Databases and Sparse Columns
SQL 2008, 2008R2 and SQL 2012 all support “sparse columns” and “column sets“. These are SQL technologies that allows a row to grow beyond the usual 8K-per-row limit (up to 2GB of data when expressed as Xml). Under the hood, the AllUserData table still has [nvarchar1] through to [nvarchar64] and beyond! In fact there are 262 nvarchars, 1000 bits, 550 datetimes, 550 floats, 750 ints, 262 ntexts, 262 sql_variants, 350 uniqueidentifiers and 2 geographies (in a pear tree). (Thank you to Lior Gal for pointing me in the right direction!)
See the MSDN reference article on SharePoint 2013 AllUserData table design here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh625524.aspx.
But why didn’t these show up in SQL Management Studio? This is behaviour by designer to prevent poor performance when selecting form wide tables.
AllUserData Performance Issues in SharePoint 2013
Three general observations:
- For list sizes below 5000 SQL rows, lists that don’t use SharePoint indexed columns will probably be slower.
- For lists greater than 5000 SQL rows, unless we’re using SharePoint column indices in our query, SharePoint list throttling should kick in, and terminate the query before it gets started.
- For most list use cases, it is still massively important to use SharePoint column indices. But if you do decide to switch off throttling for a list, performance should be faster than under SharePoint 2007.
So, in summary: even in SharePoint 2013, make sure you have suitable indexed columns.

European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Resolving The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable
Jun 18th
Trying to create a external content type by using the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Designer I got the error “The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable”
Cause
This was caused by the fact that I had installed a “PowerPivot” SharePoint 2010 installation and during the installation you do not run the SharePoint 2010 Configuration Wizard.
Solution
First ensure all update are installed, by using Microsoft Windows Update, then go to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration page and click on Configuration Wizards:
Run the wizard, make sure the Business Data Connectivity Service is checked.
After running this wizard I still got the same exception, this was caused by some services where not running, check if all services are running: Central Administration > Manage services on server:
After starting some services, see screendump the error was resolved

Europe SharePoint Server 2013 Hosting :: How to Setup Managed Metadata Service Application on SharePoint Server 2013
May 13th
In this post I will tell you how to configure Managed Metadata Service Application on SharePoint Farm. The Managed Metadata’s primary purpose is to provide you with a central location to store metadata (commonly defined as data about data) that can be utilised throughout any site within your SharePoint farm.
Here we start configuration of metadata server.
1) Open Central Administration, Go to Application Management >> Manage Service Application >> Click on New >> Select Managed Metadata Service.
You can give name to service whatever you want, I’ve given “Managed Metadata Service” for more clarity.
and Database name as Managed_Metadata.
Give AppPool name “SharePoint – Managed Metadata Service”
I’ve used svcMetadata service account for Application Pool Identity.
Click on OK.
Once the service is created you can see it listed on Managed Service Application Page.
Now we need to start Metadata Service from SharePoint Services on Server page.
for that go to Central Panel >> Under System Settings >> Manage Services on the server.
Start “Managed Metadata Web Service”
Go back to Manage Application Service and Open Metadata Service Application
This will launch the below screen which is referred to as the Term Management Tool.