Within SharePoint 2013 the search architecture is completely changes. It comes with an improvised architecture. The main reason behind that is the integration of FAST Search. In SharePoint 2013 search architecture, there are six Search Components and four Search Databases.
Below are the six Search Components under this Search architecture:
1. Crawl Component: The main objective of Crawl component is to crawl the content sources and delivers the crawled items which include content and metadata to CPC (Content Processing Component).
2. Content Processing Component: This Content Processing Component is placed in between the Crawl Component and Index Component. The processing of all the crawled items are done by Content Processing Component and then fed into the Index Component. The document parsing and property mapping are included under this process.
3. Index Component: The Content Processing Component transfers the processed items to Index Component where this Index Component writes it to an index file. It also receives the queries from the Query Processing Component and provides the results sets
4. Query Processing Component: This component resides between the front end and the Index Component. The major role of this component is the overall analyses and processes search queries and results. The search query is then processed and submitted to the Index Component. Then the Index Component gives the result set based on the processed query to the Query Processing Component. The query processing component then send this result to the front end by the Query Processing Component.
5. Administration Component: The role of Administration Component is the running of the system processes essential to search. It gives the provisioning part of adding and initializing search components. It uses search administration database. There can be multiple Administration Component for a Search Service application but only one would be active at a time
6. Analytics Processing Component: Analytics Processing Component (APC) analyses the overall search and the crawled items. It also deals with the search analytics and usage analytics which manages that how users interact with the search results. APC improves the relevancy of the search and creates search reports with this information.
Apart from these components, there are four databases which are associated with the search architecture in SharePoint 2013.
1. Crawl Database: Crawl database is used by crawl component to store information about the crawled items. This information includes the complete historical information about the crawled items.
2. Search Administration Database: This database is used by the Administration Component. It manages the information about all the system process related to the search.
3. Link Database: The Link database stores the information coming from the CPC (Content Processing Component). The overall search clicks and search result data is stored under link database.
4. Analytics Database: The information stored in Link database is unprocessed. The is done by APC. After this analysis the information on the usage analytics is stored in Analytics Database.
Sizing in SharePoint 2013 is done in the two ways: can be done in two manners:
1. Scale up: Here more number of hardware resources are used up. These resources are more in number and are faster resources.
2. Scale out: It includes the addition of more number of machines and distributing it to the all components over the machines.
We should avoid sharing critical resources in order to have effective and efficient performance.