Noderunner.exe – show search role (Query, Index, ContentProcessing, Analytics, Admin)
During performance troubleshooting you might discover “noderunner.exe” is consuming a lot of hardware. But what does it do? Well, noderunner supports everything for search in SharePoint 2013. The trick is knowing which PID instance of “noderunner.exe” matching to which search role:
- Query
- Index
- ContentProcessing
- Analytics
- Admin
Below you can see the “Command Line” property of each running process. Here, we can see the “—noderoot” argument when the EXE first launched. That clearly shows the role so you’ll know if CPU is high or RAM is low because of a single particular search role. Also, I’ve included a PowerShell command to get the same output.
Hope that helps! 
gwmi win32_process -filter "name='noderunner.exe'" | select name,processId,commandLine | fl
Great info, Jeff. Do you typically avoid installing search in your development environments, or, if you do install it, do you leave it paused from CA until you need it? I’ve been having some performance issues lately and am considering removing the search service application for now because I’m not developing anything for it. However, if I need it in the future, it would be great to know if there’s a way to calm it down until I’m ready to do something with it. “Calm down, search!”
Great question! Developing “search driven applications” is cool stuff and would require search. Also, talking to search over JSON is cool. Personally I always create search, but then rename “noderunner.exe” to “noderunner.exe.DISABLE” =) Simple trick but helps 1) save RAM and 2) easy to rename, reboot, and have search up in just a minute.