How to fix: SharePoint 2013 Search not working and EPM / PWA is slow

Where do you start debugging the issue? I first checked the Search Service Application

• Navigate to Central Admin
• Under System Settings select Manage services on server
• Select SharePoint Server Search and check Search Service Application

Sure enough, it pointed out what's wrong.

Issue

The Search Service Application Topology was throwing an error:

Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running.

Resolution Steps

I referred to the SharePoint ULS logs and noticed that the Query Processing Component was throwing the following error:

There was no endpoint listening at [URL] that could access the message.

Tried IMS endpoints for operation execution: operation sent to IMS failed: Resource saturation, Try again later

This pointed out that the search service was trying to use a resource but something was limiting the usage.

Solution

The issue was resolved by configuring the noderunner.exe.config file by changing the value of the node <memoryLimitMegaBytes> to 0 (zero).

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

Further References

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

To identify which noderunner.exe is taking up all the memory, please follow this URL:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kristopherloranger/archive/2014/03/24/sharepoint-2013-noderunner-exe-process-information.aspx