Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes a resource usage control for the resource-intensive processes that are commonly performed on SharePoint Portal Server computers. These processes are crawling content to create full-text indexes and searching.

With the Background usage setting, the server gives higher priority to other applications. With the Dedicated usage setting, the server reserves most of the system resources for searching or creating a full-text index. By default, SharePoint Portal Server configures the control as follows:

• In a single server deployment, the setting is halfway between Background and Dedicated.
• In a server farm configuration, any index management server will have the index resource usage set to Dedicated. Any search server will have the query resource usage set to Dedicated. The resource usage is automatically configured when you make changes on the Configure Server Topology page.

Note  If you use this server to run other applications, such as Microsoft SQL Server, avoid adjusting the controls to Dedicated or near-Dedicated usage because this setting may affect resources that are dedicated to those applications.

Specify resource usage

1. On the SharePoint Portal Server Central Administration for Server server_name page, in the Component Configuration section, click Manage the Search Service.
2. On the Manage the Search Service for SharePoint Portal Server page, in the Servers and Topology section, click the server name.
3. On the Search Server Settings page, click the Server Settings tab.
4. In the Resource Usage section, select the amount of resources to use for content index resources. The more dedicated the resource usage, the quicker those tasks are completed, but the fewer resources remain for other purposes.
5. Click Apply.