Fix Memory Leak in SharePoint 2013 Preview (Microsoft Office 2013 Component / NodeRunner.exe)

I’ve recently run into performance issues with my new SharePoint 2013 Preview development environment. A quick investigation in Task Manager highlight Memory usage as my issue. The culprit processes are Microsoft Office 2013 component. I see SharePoint 2013 is somehow behind my issue.

What are these Microsoft Office 2013 components and why are they consuming so much memory?

Switching to the details tab, these Microsoft Office 2013 components show up as noderunner.exe

Now having a bit more to search on I quickly uncovered the TechNet article SharePoint 2013 Preview – Hungry search service

This article attributes the issue to a memory leak in the SharePoint 2013 Preview Search Service.

To apply the fix from this article on the SharePoint 2013 server start the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell and and enter the following command:

Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel Reduced

To ensure the setting has been changed enter the following command:

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService

Then you need to edit the noderunner.exe.config file located at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config

Edit this file (I used Notepad), and locate the line <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes=”0” />

Provide a memory limit for the noderunner process, I set the limit at 250 as shown below.

After making these changes I recommend you restart your server. Although I have had no problem with just killing the noderunner.exe processes in Task Manager; SharePoint creates them again almost immediately.

Keep in mind this fix is suggested for SharePoint 2013 Preview only, I’m hoping the bug will be fixed for RTM.