Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Unleashed

Hardware Requirements for Service Application Roles

The service application roles, depending on how many run on an individual server, can have serious hardware requirements. The search service application role, for example, which is responsible for creating a full-text searchable index for search, is the heaviest hitting of the SharePoint roles, excluding, of course, the database role. Search service application servers typically consume more memory and processor capacity because they are constantly engaged in the process of crawling content and making it searchable. Depending on the number of content sources crawled, there can be significant memory requirements, and index servers have been known to use at least 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB of memory and ...